Re: Collaborating with TODO lists and clocks.

[Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu>]

Hi Gareth,

Gareth Smith <gds@doc.ic.ac.uk> writes:

> I hadn't thought of using :tags on a clock table. I still worry if we'll
> find ourselves in a situation where more than one of us has clocked in
> some time on the same task.

Yes, I agree this might not be optimal, for that case in particular.
One nice thing about this use of tags is that you have a representation
of when more than one person is working on a task, but that makes the
clock less useful, as it can no longer represent an individual's working
time without some effort to separate the clocks of the different owners.

> For example, often I clock into a task while I do the work of
> sub-dividing it into smaller tasks. And often when I'm actively working
> on a task, I'll create a sub-task of my current-clocked-task on the
> fly. It seems to me that if I continue with this sort of working
> practice, and attempt to collaborate with others who work similarly,
> then we might quickly find that it's not easy to describe a given task
> (or even subtask) as being "owned" by a single person.

So one problem case is where you "own" a task, but someone else owns one
of its subtasks, e.g.:

==========================================
* Clock tables
#+BEGIN: clocktable :maxlevel 2 :scope file :tags "+gareth"
#+CAPTION: Clock summary at [2013-04-29 Mon 18:25]
| Headline           | Time   |      |
|--------------------+--------+------|
| *Total time*       | *3:05* |      |
|--------------------+--------+------|
| TODO Task 1        | 3:05   |      |
| \__ TODO Subtask 1 |        | 1:05 |
| \__ TODO Subtask 2 |        | 1:00 |
#+END:
#+BEGIN: clocktable :maxlevel 2 :scope file :tags "+john"
#+CAPTION: Clock summary at [2013-04-29 Mon 18:17]
| Headline           | Time   |      |
|--------------------+--------+------|
| *Total time*       | *1:05* |      |
|--------------------+--------+------|
| TODO Task 1        | 1:05   |      |
| \__ TODO Subtask 1 |        | 1:05 |
#+END:

* TODO Task 1							     :gareth:
  CLOCK: [2013-04-29 Mon 18:15]--[2013-04-29 Mon 19:15] =>  1:00
** TODO Subtask 1						       :john:
   CLOCK: [2013-04-29 Mon 18:15]--[2013-04-29 Mon 19:20] =>  1:05
** TODO Subtask 2						     :gareth:
   CLOCK: [2013-04-29 Mon 16:16]--[2013-04-29 Mon 17:16] =>  1:00
==========================================

Notice that Gareth gets credit for John's time on Subtask 1, because
Gareth owns Task 1.

You can avoid this particular gotcha in (at least) two ways:

1) Remove the :gareth: tag on task 1 and move the clock time to subtask
2 (more generally, "ownership" tags and clock times should only appear
at the lowest level of the task tree).  Maybe this makes the most sense,
but it slows down the worflow a bit and is hard to enforce, etc.

2) Use a tag filter like "+gareth-john" to build the clock table (more
generally, the clock table for each person should exclude tags for all
the others).  This prevents double counting and is easy to enforce, but
if any tasks have more than one owner, no one will get credit for their
clock times.

> Again, perhaps my workflow is at fault, and I should be organising
> myself in a more principled way. And perhaps in practice I'll find that
> tasks do tend to be owned by just one person anyway. 

Yeah, it's a hard problem with no general solution that I can see.  The
best thing is just to figure out what constraints you're willing to put
on your workflow, given what Org allows you to do.

Hope that's helpful!

Best,
Richard