About diary and time tracking

About diary and time tracking

[Rustom Mody]

I gather (dont recall exactly from where) that there are alternatives
to using the builtin emacs diary (Subsection: Calendar Diary
Integration in Section Agenda views).

Likewise I think Carsten has written somewhere that the time tracking
setup of Sacha Chua at
http://sachachua.com/wp/2007/12/30/clocking-time-with-emacs-org/
has largely been incorporated into later versions of org.

So my 2 questions...
 - What are the diary alternatives (if any)?
 - What is the minimum setup to get some of (not necessarily all the
bells and whistles) Sacha's time tracking stuff?

Context: I may be demoing org to a corporate and ease of setup is
often a bigger selling point than a zillion sophisticated
possibilities

Re: About diary and time tracking

[Carsten Dominik]

Hi Rustom,

On Aug 4, 2008, at 8:25 AM, Rustom Mody wrote:

> I gather (dont recall exactly from where) that there are alternatives
> to using the builtin emacs diary (Subsection: Calendar Diary
> Integration in Section Agenda views).

the main alternative is to use the Org scheduling possibilities, and  
to include diary sexp entries directly into Org files.

> Likewise I think Carsten has written somewhere that the time tracking
> setup of Sacha Chua at
> http://sachachua.com/wp/2007/12/30/clocking-time-with-emacs-org/
> has largely been incorporated into later versions of org.

This mainly referes to the following:

1. You can request that clocking in an entry will switch its TODO  
state, see the variable org-`clock-in-switch-to-state'

2. The clock time tables accept a ":step" parameter that allows to  
split the report into steps like days or weeks.

HTH

- Carsten