In the past I was not very good at time management. There were always tasks I should be performing, but I did not always get to them as quickly as I should. Plus, there would be the occasional task I would forget about completely. Finally, it was not a good use of my limited brain power to keep track of the tasks yet to be completed.

In order to manage my time better, I’ve been looking into various tools. The simplest: a plain piece of lined paper. All the tasks are written onto this “Master Todo List” and as you finish the task you strike a line through it. It works, but it doesn’t scale very well. Plus there is a limited amount of space to write if you try to go one task per line.

What I really wanted was a program to handle this book-keeping for me. I initially thought I would write my own, but that seemed like a poor use of my time, so I investigated other programs out there. One of the requirements is that it run under Linux. After much searching I came across planner-el, which nicely integrates into my Emacs editor.

After playing around with it for a few weeks I’ve made a few tweaks to improve my time-tracking ability. The following Lisp function builds on the planner-timeclock.el module to log the time spent on a task on the task’s page.

;;
;; Add additional support for logging what happened while clocked into
;; a project.
;;
(defvar my-current-task-info nil
  "Full information about the currently clocked in task.")

(defadvice planner-task-in-progress (after planner-timeclock-note activate)
  "Store the full information about the current task on clockin."
  (setq my-current-task-info (planner-current-task-info)))

(defadvice timeclock-out (around planner-timeclock-note activate)
  "Create a note in the for the task describing what happened during
the clocked-in period."
  ad-do-it

  ;; Now try to add the note for the task
  (when my-current-task-info
    (planner-create-note (goto-task-page my-current-task-info))
    (insert
     "<*:" (timeclock-seconds-to-string (timeclock-last-period) t) ">"
     " "
     "Clocked out of task "
     (format-time-string "%Y/%m/%d %H:%M:%S" (current-time))
     "\n\n")

    ;; clear the task since we're now logged out
    (setq my-current-task-info nil)
    )
  )

(defun goto-task-page (info)
  "Redirect either to the plan page for the task, or failing that
the day page.  Returns the task page selected."
  (let ((plan (planner-task-plan info))
         (date (planner-task-date info)))
    (if plan
        (planner-goto-plan-page plan)
      (planner-goto date))
    (or plan date)))

With the above timeclock “notes”, I can write a simple script to parse those lines and turn them into an invoice for a customer (or just myself.) I love Emacs!