Re: Alternatives to clocking in/out for reporting time

[Samuel Wales]

a few things taht are probably all completely obvious or investigated
or irrelevant just in case.  just brainstorm.

do you have everything relevant in the same subtrees?  i.e. not
wanting granular, can you search upward for a dominating entry kind of
like git searching upward for the .git dir or so?  property drawer
could control what's a dominating entry.  you probably thoguht of this
or of having whatever categories as tags or categories in entries
though. in any case that would clock.  you could even have clocking
clock into that no matter wher eyou are via some timer in principle.
just a brainstorm.  you said dynamic som perhaps there is no
dominating entry for each category though.

org-time-stamp-rounding-minutes and org-clock-rounding-minutes .  i
presume you don't find them relevant.

reminder: inactive ts in the clocked notation is usualy treated
separately by org [i.e. not hte same type of ts] from bare ia.

perhaps some kind of text property in the following could categorize
entries and then org can sum them perhaps via some hook you'd
populate.  it might be possible in principle to re-create most of the
old agenda L timeline view, but with multiple files instead of a
single file and with a search filter, by using the search agenda view,
as there is some intermediate function, perhaps
org-agenda-before-sorting-filter-function.  idk if you neeed multiple
bare ia tses [or of various types of tses perhaps if you do decide you
need more than bare ia] per entry but doing so is probalby possible
merely by having that function add the duplicates.  the ts would be
put in the prefix format.  you'd have to have custom sorting by
whichever ts you are recording [in the total list] for each entry; idk
if that is straightforward.

above probably useless but just in case somethinghtere is relevant.

 6/29/22, Russell Adams <RLAdams@adamsinfoserv.com> wrote:
> I make extensive use of timestamps for billing (timesheet)
> purposes. I'm looking to automate this more, and I find the existing
> clocking system inadequate. I'm hoping someone can point me in the
> right direction.
>
> Today I have log mode enabled so that each time I close a TODO item,
> it records the date and time it was closed. At regular intervals while
> working I add inactive timestamps to my notes. I've mapped that to a
> single key, so it's quite fast. If I switch tasks, have an update,
> made progress I want to note to myself, or leave and return I add an
> inactive timestamp. I have well over 1000 inactive timestamps in my
> current file.
>
> Later I can open my agenda view on the working file, choose my
> timespan (week or month), enable log mode to show when items were
> closed, and then enable inactive timestamps to view all of the
> timestamps. This itemizes all the events organized by time into a
> timeline.
>
> It's fairly straightforward from that timeline to count my hours based
> on the record of where I spent my time. It is unfortunately a very
> manual process.
>
> I find Org's clocking to be too detailed, and that it doesn't play
> well with dynamically organized hierarchies of notes. I frequently
> create and close subtasks, or switch parts of the tree. Clocking each
> one is too much overhead, and too granular. I don't need to provide
> down to the minute reports of each item. It also doesn't appear to
> allow rounding of values, so I still have to adjust the results.
>
> What I envision is a way to count items in the agenda view to produce
> a time report. Counting any inactive timestamp as 15 minutes, where if
> a half hour or more is logged I round up to bill the hour. Closed TODO
> items should count toward billing that whole hour. Clearly this should
> be customized.
>
> The point is that I'm not worried about accounting time by task,
> instead I'm aggregating tasks into accounting by whole hours.
>
> I'm looking at org-element, and it appears I'd have to do my own
> agenda style scan of the whole tree to find items to classify by
> hour. While I'm somewhat proficient at elisp, that sounds like a steep
> wall to climb.
>
> Is there an iterative way to review items in an agenda view so I can
> do the math to produce a report?
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> Russell Adams                            RLAdams@AdamsInfoServ.com
>                                     https://www.adamsinfoserv.com/
>
>


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