org-mode and clocking in

Posted on Tue 20 September 2011 by alex in geek

I've recently started using org-mode's time tracking to keep track of what I spend my time doing at work. This was in response to being asked by one of my managers what I spend my time doing and basically being forced to guess.

Setting up a clock page is fairly simple. It's then just a case of C-c C-x C-i and C-c C-x C-o on the appropriate sub tasks. Dynamic blocks can then be added to your org-document to generate weekly, monthly or annual reports based on the clock lines in the document.

So far the results have been illuminating and certainly shows how optimistic I can be in predicting how much time I spend doing my core job hacking on the code. However one thing that is captured but hard to summarise is interruption cost. I've taken to switching task every-time I'm interrupted in person or by phone call (I'm not counting IM/IRC as it's less disruptive). I can eyeball the raw data and see that some weeks are exceptionally bad for task switching. However what would useful is a break-down of mean and median clock lengths against each task to give some sort of indication of how much straight line hacking I've gotten done. I have a feeling the :formula and :formatter options could be used for this but I've been struggling to find any example. Does anyone do a similar analysis with their org-mode clock data?

UPDATED: fixed keystrokes.