Re: [Emacs-orgmode] Use case of TIMESTAMP, SCHEDULED and DEADLINE

[Austin Frank]

Christian Egli wrote:

>      1. What is the use case of TIMESTAMP? I seem to only have a use
>         for SCHEDULED, so marking them as "Scheduled:" in the
>         Org-Agenda Week mode is superfluous for me. What do other
>         people use it for?


Hello!  In my previous thread I noted that I want to use org to manage 
notes and tasks.  This left out an important aspect of the way I have 
used org and intend to, one of things that actually pushed me toward the 
system in the first place.  I also need to track how I'm spending time 
on my tasks.

I recently lost ~20 lbs, and the most important tool for affecting that 
change was writing down my weight every day and kept a running average 
(I used the system described in the Hacker's Diet).  Just seeing the 
trend was enough to keep me motivated to eat a little bit less each day, 
or find a small extra opportunity to be active.

As a graduate student I'm not required to do much in the way of 
accounting for how I use my time, as long as certain long-term 
milestones are met.  This can make it difficult to stay on task during 
shorter stretches.  Even breaking large tasks into small ones and 
documenting my progress on them can sometimes lead to a lot of small 
tasks being put off just as long as the large one would have been.

So, just like for weight loss, I want to start keeping a record of my 
daily time use.  Hopefully, once I have enough data to aggregate and 
look at the trends, I'll be able to pinpoint areas where I can improve 
and will be able to motivate myself to stay on task longer or return to 
my tasks more quickly after distractions.

A guide for beginning grad students in the computer science department 
at my university suggests keeping a log file where you record your 
accomplishments at 15 minute intervals on days when you're having 
trouble being productive.  I've tried this, using an external timer and 
marking an org file with a time stamp for each entry.  I found the 
method to be both too frequent and too removed from my current task to 
be especially useful.

My intention is to keep an org file (per day? per week?  per month?) 
where I track my work using timestamp ranges and links.  When I start on 
a task I'll make a time stamp and link to a resource relevant to the 
task (the file I'm editing, the article I'm reading, notes from the 
class I'm going to).  When I finish a task or change tasks, I'll mark 
the end of the time range I spent on that task (and begin a new one if 
necessary).  In some cases I'll record notes with the entry about what 
happened while I worked, to try to pin down things that are especially 
effective or especially distracting.

I do think there's something to the notion of making regular progress 
reports while you work during stretches where it's hard to stay on task. 
 In a case where I was following this strategy, I would still start an 
entry with a time range and a link to my current work, but I might 
include sub-entries marked with timestamps to allow me to keep 
finer-grained records of my progress.  I intend to write a nag-me elisp 
function that prompts for a new entry after a certain amount of time has 
elapsed-- hopefully with programmable prompt intervals.  I have a hunch 
that an exponential function describing the interval between prompts 
might be effective:  record often early in the task to get myself honed 
in, but record less often as time passes and I become more involved with 
the work.

I believe that tagging these progress entries with a series of 
categorical tags will allow me to aggregate across similar tasks and do 
some analysis of how much time I'm spending on different tasks.  I'd 
like to be able to ask questions like "How much time did I spend last 
week on project X?", "How much time did I spend last week on all 
research projects?", and "How much time did I spend last week working 
productively?".  I'm hopeful that the org/tables/calc combination will 
serve me well in pursuing this.

Hope that gives you some ideas about some potential uses of timestamps 
and time ranges.  I'd welcome any comments about the ideas I've 
described here, whether people are using similar systems or have 
different approaches to the same kind of issue.

Thanks,
/au