3 ms·

I am currently beginning to use org-mode to keep track of what I do at work. When my boss comes into the office on Friday afternoon and asks us what we did all

by krylon 11y ago

I am currently beginning to use org-mode to keep track of what I do at work. When my boss comes into the office on Friday afternoon and asks us what we did all week, I usually have a hard time remembering what I did on Monday or Tuesday. Having a record of that will hopefully help. Once I have gotten into the habit of writing down what I did, I hope to also use it for time-tracking, so I can also tell my boss that I worked on Task A for five hours and Task B for three hours. It is impressive how rich the feature set is, even though I currently use just a tiny fraction of it.

chris_st 11y ago
I wrote a pretty simple web app to do just this -- write down what I did, per project or task, and how long I worked on it. I eventually gave up on keeping track of the time, as I found I didn't really need it. It's really useful, not only on weekly staff meetings, but in our (SIGH...) yearly appraisals. I didn't know about org-mode at the time...
- krylon 11y ago
  There are plenty of software projects, both FLOSS and proprietaty that aim to support people in this, mainly because many, many people need to keep track of their time. On the other hand, each person's workflow and environment is different, so there probably is no one-size-fits-all solution for this sort of thing. So, given that it is not an excessively complex problem, rolling your own is perfectly fine, I think. (Probably fun, too.) But in my case, learning org-mode was faster than rolling my own. And of course, one doesn't need to use every bell and whistle.
Splines 11y ago
FWIW, I use OneNote to do this. One section per month, and then a tab for every week. I put high level tasks under each week and put my notes in as appropriate. I tried using org-mode but it took too much time to learn when the alternative I had on hand (OneNote) was much easier to learn. Yes, I don't get the same feature set with org-mode, but all I wanted was a work journal.
- krylon 11y ago
  As much as I enjoy bashing Microsoft Office, OneNote is a real pleasure to use. If I had it on my laptop, I might have used it for this purpose, too. But, alas, my laptop has Office 2007 Pro, which does come with Access (which I have no use for), but without OneNote (I think it was still a separate product back then). IMHO MS Office has mostly gotten worse and worse with each release following 2007, but I really do envy my coworkers who have OneNote on their machines (although few actually use it). For somebody not wanting to dive into the complexities of org-mode, OneNote is - depending on the platform - a great alternative. Probably, OneNote can do things org-mode cannot, and vice versa. But they address similar scenarios. I for one have already invested heavily into becoming proficient with emacs, have it open all the time, anyway, so spending time making emacs do even more things for me seems like a good investment at this point. Also, the result might be slightly confusing but it still is a plain text file that can be read with any text editor.

by krylon 11y ago

chris_st 11y ago

I wrote a pretty simple web app to do just this -- write down what I did, per project or task, and how long I worked on it. I eventually gave up on keeping track of the time, as I found I didn't really need it. It's really useful, not only on weekly staff meetings, but in our (SIGH...) yearly appraisals. I didn't know about org-mode at the time...

krylon 11y ago
There are plenty of software projects, both FLOSS and proprietaty that aim to support people in this, mainly because many, many people need to keep track of their time. On the other hand, each person's workflow and environment is different, so there probably is no one-size-fits-all solution for this sort of thing. So, given that it is not an excessively complex problem, rolling your own is perfectly fine, I think. (Probably fun, too.) But in my case, learning org-mode was faster than rolling my own. And of course, one doesn't need to use every bell and whistle.

Splines 11y ago

FWIW, I use OneNote to do this. One section per month, and then a tab for every week. I put high level tasks under each week and put my notes in as appropriate. I tried using org-mode but it took too much time to learn when the alternative I had on hand (OneNote) was much easier to learn. Yes, I don't get the same feature set with org-mode, but all I wanted was a work journal.

krylon 11y ago
As much as I enjoy bashing Microsoft Office, OneNote is a real pleasure to use. If I had it on my laptop, I might have used it for this purpose, too. But, alas, my laptop has Office 2007 Pro, which does come with Access (which I have no use for), but without OneNote (I think it was still a separate product back then). IMHO MS Office has mostly gotten worse and worse with each release following 2007, but I really do envy my coworkers who have OneNote on their machines (although few actually use it). For somebody not wanting to dive into the complexities of org-mode, OneNote is - depending on the platform - a great alternative. Probably, OneNote can do things org-mode cannot, and vice versa. But they address similar scenarios. I for one have already invested heavily into becoming proficient with emacs, have it open all the time, anyway, so spending time making emacs do even more things for me seems like a good investment at this point. Also, the result might be slightly confusing but it still is a plain text file that can be read with any text editor.