Tasks are powerful by themselves but org takes project planning even deeper. Org has a wonderful triad of features to help you with personal project planning and consulting. These are:
- [x] Clocking
- [x] Clock reports
- [x] Estimates
- [ ] Column Mode
I know I said triad, but I don’t have column mode implemented yet and it will likely be a while as I work to figure out how best to make that a reality.
These features work together to allow you to estimate your expected time on a task, clock in and out as you work on the tasks and build reports that delineate how your estimates stacked up against your actual expenditures of time. For those of us that are always looking to grow in our project management skills, disciplined use of the clock is powerful ally.
For those of us working as consultants or in other industries where a time sheet can be valuable the clock reports can be a huge benefit.
Org has the ability to start and stop a clock and record the elapsed time in your property drawer. While Org allows you to record your clock values anywhere in a heading, I have avoided that. Not only is it easier searching for clocked values in a property drawer, but my bias is showing here in that I prefer storing my clock values in the property drawer. Perhaps if someone else has the time to lend a hand in the future we can support the other means of editing properties.
Clock reports are nothing more that a dynamic block that builds a text table showing how you have spent your time.
Sometimes it is handier NOT to use the clock. Captures can be setup to capture to the active clock, but sometimes clocking your work can be tedious. Clocking is not for everyone. For that reason I have a special custom ID that I find fairly handy. TODAY is an ID that has some helper methods around it.
You can:
- Mark a heading as “TODAY”
- Capture to TODAY
- Link another heading from Today
Following part of the GTD philosophy I find it is quite useful to build projects with lists of actions to be taken.
When keeping a worklog, the natural tendency is to write task lists in your entry for that day. I have found this is less than ideal. Projets often bleed over between days, so have a project in your log for that day is very inefficient as you end up juggling the task every day.
Instead I tend to do the following:
- Start a new entry in my work log each morning.
- I mark that entry as the TODAY entry.
- I then do triage. This is a process to clear my inbox.
- I enter any new tasks from my email.
- I clear out any refile captures I may have.
- I then go over all my projects, ensure stuck projects have a NEXT item
- I also OrgLinkToToday on tasks that I think I will accomplish that day This will add a subheading in my worklog with a link to the project task. It also schedules the task for today. As part of this I either remove the time or adjust it to when during the day I may need to handle that task.
- I add any meetings I may have that day.
From then on out I can use the agenda to manage and track my day. I have a clear understanding of what it is I am trying to achieve and I can quickly jump to my worklog entry for today using OrgJumpToToday
This is not as good as clocking in many ways, but it does help me work efficiently when I do not care about clocking my efforts.
I am not a fan of sub minute clocks. OrgExtended has an option to erase clock entries that are less than 1 minute.
You can choose what behaviour you would appreciate
TODO
TODO