Re: How to track time spent on a project

[Bernt Hansen <bernt@norang.ca>]

Geralt <usr.gentoo@googlemail.com> writes:

> I want to track the time that I'll spend on a new project. For this
> I'm planning to use org-mode's clocking feature, so far my first tests
> (I've never used org-agenda before) showed me that I can do this
> easily from the agenda view, as long as I have a DATE: property in my
> node. And that's a bit of a problem because I don't really have a
> scheduled date when I'm going to work on a part of this project.
> Is there a way in org-mode to just clock the time and have the agenda
> view show me on the views for every day (or time interval) just the
> clocked times for every tree item that fall into this time
> interval/range?
> And how can I start clocking items that do not show up in the agenda
> view?

Just visit the org file with the task you want to clock in and do C-c
C-x C-i to clock it in.  C-c C-x C-o stops the clock (or when you clock
in something else it stops).  You can only clock one thing at a time.
Play with it in a test task to see how it works.

You can clock in from the agenda directly (if it's visible there) with
just I (and O for clock out)

I've documented how I use clocking stuff here:

http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html#Clocking

>I'm not sure if it's understandable what I want, so I here's a
> small example org-file and a description of what I want to see and how
> I want to work on it:
> Basic layout of the org-file:
> * Part 1
>   :CLOCK:
>   CLOCK: [2009-07-20 Mon 12:40]--[2009-07-20 Mon 14:43] =>  2:03
>   CLOCK: [2009-07-23 Thu 22:28]--[2009-07-23 Thu 22:48] =>  0:20
>   :END:
> * Part 2
>   :CLOCK:
>   CLOCK: [2009-07-24 Fri 09:45]--[2009-07-24 Fri 11:15] =>  1:30
>   :END:
>
> What I want:
> (Re-)start at any time the clocking of one of either Part 1 or Part 2
> whenever I'm working on it and get summaries of the total working
> times on a day, week, or whatever time interval I want and the total
> working time I've spent on the project or single parts on it.
>
>
> I assume that a lot of you are using org-mode exactly for this purpose
> and probably you know how to do it better, so if you have any
> suggestions how I could do it better please tell me :-)

The agenda is not limited to date ranges.  You can find tasks to clock
in via the agenda in lots of ways such as:

  - tags searches  (C-c a m)
  - org-occur searches by regexp (C-c a /)
  - custom agenda view

etc.

I tend to clock in tasks that show up on my agenda for today, or from
STARTED or NEXT tag searches.

HTH,

Bernt