Add "legacy" time tracking as CLOCK entries

Add "legacy" time tracking as CLOCK entries

[Richard Walker]

Hi, while I've been using org-mode for some time, I'm now working
on a project where I've decided to use the time-tracking functions.
But I've got some "legacy" time on the project that I would like
to incorporate. I.e., I have in my (paper) log book a record of
(say) half an hour spent on a certain day, but I don't have a record
of the start and end time and I don't want to invent them.

I note that I can add an entry that looks like this:

    CLOCK: => 0:30

and have this contribute to totals. But I would
also like to record the date for this entry.

Checking the regular expression in org-clock-sum
and a bit of trial and error showed that
this _doesn't_ work:

    CLOCK: [2013-12-11 Wed] => 0:30

and nor does:

    CLOCK: [2013-12-11 Wed]--[2013-12-11 Wed] => 0:30

But this does seem to work:

    CLOCK: => 0:30 [2013-12-11 Wed]

I've figured this out myself on the basis of not finding anything
about it in the manual. Nevertheless, is there a "standard"
way of doing this that I missed?

Re: Add "legacy" time tracking as CLOCK entries

[Sebastien Vauban]

Richard Walker wrote:
> Hi, while I've been using org-mode for some time, I'm now working
> on a project where I've decided to use the time-tracking functions.
> But I've got some "legacy" time on the project that I would like
> to incorporate. I.e., I have in my (paper) log book a record of
> (say) half an hour spent on a certain day, but I don't have a record
> of the start and end time and I don't want to invent them.
>
> I note that I can add an entry that looks like this:
>
>     CLOCK: => 0:30
>
> and have this contribute to totals. But I would
> also like to record the date for this entry.
>
> Checking the regular expression in org-clock-sum
> and a bit of trial and error showed that
> this _doesn't_ work:
>
>     CLOCK: [2013-12-11 Wed] => 0:30
>
> and nor does:
>
>     CLOCK: [2013-12-11 Wed]--[2013-12-11 Wed] => 0:30
>
> But this does seem to work:
>
>     CLOCK: => 0:30 [2013-12-11 Wed]
>
> I've figured this out myself on the basis of not finding anything
> about it in the manual. Nevertheless, is there a "standard"
> way of doing this that I missed?

Can't you try to convert your lines to:

      CLOCK: [2013-12-11 Wed 0:00]--[2013-12-11 Wed 0:30] => 0:30
                                                    ^^^^     ^^^^
                                                      duration

This seems the simplest option to me.

Best regards,
  Seb

-- 
Sebastien Vauban

Re: Add "legacy" time tracking as CLOCK entries

[Richard Walker]

On 15/01/2014, Sebastien Vauban <sva-news@mygooglest.com> wrote:
> Richard Walker wrote:
>> I note that I can add an entry that looks like this:
>>
>>     CLOCK: => 0:30
>>
>> and have this contribute to totals. But I would
>> also like to record the date for this entry.
...
>
> Can't you try to convert your lines to:
>
>       CLOCK: [2013-12-11 Wed 0:00]--[2013-12-11 Wed 0:30] => 0:30
>                                                     ^^^^     ^^^^
>                                                       duration

That's just the sort of thing I wanted to avoid.

But now I've found that "my" way doesn't show the durations
in the Agenda views; yours does.
So I have switched all the entries to your way.

On some days, I have several of these entries for
different tasks, so I get "Clocking overlap" errors in
the Day-Agenda view when I use the clockcheck
function.

OK, the solution to that is to ignore those errors ...