Introduction
I have recently started tracking my time in org mode more. This helps me know whether or not I wasted a lot of time on the computer that day. I have a special heading for "time I wasted loafing about" where I clock in when I want to watch YouTube, for example. For other time spent I make a quick note about what I plan to do. This also helps me stay on track.
Purpose of the workflow
- Increase mindfulness about how much time I spend on certain tasks that are productive or unproductive.
- Limit how many tasks I accomplish per day by writing down what I think I can actually accomplish on days when I have a large pile of things to do.
Workflow
Step one - Denote journal
I create my daily file with C-c n j and clock in or write something that I need to do. I have a template managed by denote. Additionally it is not part of my denote+org-roam system which I talked about extensively in this video.
Ideally I want to keep track of all the time I spend on the computer to find out how much I have wasted on a given day with this file. For now, I want to see just how much time I waste and then focus on minimizing it.
Step two - decide on task and clock in
Simply clock in to a task that you want to track time for with (org-clock-in) and start working! When you finish with the task, clock out with (org-clock-out). It's very simple. There is a bit more to this however, discuss
You can add effort to items that you want to work on. I think the intended use is to add your time spent, i.e. setting the effort to 0:15 because you want to spend 15 minutes on something. I do this naturally as part of thinking about what I will work on, so this is something that I wanted to show on the mode line as well.
Modeline info
In my literate emacs configuration I have a section for showing time tracking in the mode line. It's a custom mode line indicator built in the same style as Protesilaos's modeline. I don't like having the full name of the task cluttering up the modeline, so I made a custom indicator using the same functions that Emacs uses to build the default modeline indicator.
In the modeline the effort is represented like this:
But if I go over what I intended:
