https://www.bennee.com/~alex/2011-09-20T17:06:00+01:00the wanderings of a supposed digital native2011-09-20T17:06:00+01:002011-09-20T17:06:00+01:00alextag:www.bennee.com,2011-09-20:/~alex/blog/2011/09/20/org-mode-and-clocking-in/

<p>I've recently started using <a class="reference external" href="http://orgmode.org/">org-mode</a>'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.</p> <p>Setting up a clock page is …</p>

<p>I've recently started using <a class="reference external" href="http://orgmode.org/">org-mode</a>'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.</p> <p>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 <a class="reference external" href="http://orgmode.org/manual/The-clock-table.html#The-clock-table">weekly, monthly or annual reports</a> based on the clock lines in the document.</p> <p>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?</p> <p><strong>UPDATED</strong>: fixed keystrokes.</p>