This post is basically a reminder for myself, though some of you might find it useful.
I use the Org-mode clocking feature a lot. (Especially now that I have it synchronized with Beeminder.) While I’m not a hardcore QS fanatic, I do see their point that collecting objective, measurable data about oneself can give very valuable insights. (For instance, I learned that if you have an 8-hour-per-day job, and you spend 6 hours actually working, then you are insanely efficient – time efficiency of 50% percent is normal according to my experience.
Sometimes it happens, though, that I forget to clock out. In such a case, org-clock-idle-time (set to 5 minutes) comes to my rescue. After 5 minutes of doing nothing on the computer (which might mean that I went away and forgot about the running clock – but it could as well mean that I’m studying a scientific paper!) Emacs displays a large menu, with a lot of options – and it’s all too easy to get lost. Reading about the choices every time is wasteful, but OTOH it does not happen often enough that I can easily memorize them. Hence this post.
It turns out that I really only need three of these options:
i (ignore the question, continue with the clock),S (that is, shift-s – probably the most useful – indicates that all idle time should be subtracted from the clock).K RET (that is, shift-k RET; basically almost the same as clock out now),Read the relevant page in the Org manual for details – but most probably you will need i and S 95% of the time (and with K, you are most probably covered in 99%).
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