As I mentioned many times, I use the clocking feature of Org-mode a lot. At first, I used org-clock-display (C-c C-x C-d) to see how much time I spent on various things. This command temporarily shows times for various subtrees in your current buffers. By default, it shows the time for the current year, but I set the org-clock-display-default-range variable to today. (Alternatively, I could train myself to use the C-u prefix – this I only learned recently.) See the docstring of org-clock-display to learn even more.
However, some time ago I started using clock reports. They are really cool, since they have a lot of options to tailor them to suit exactly your needs. One thing, however, that bugged me, was that times longer than 24 hours were displayed as xd hh:mm. Since I have quite a few long-running projects which require several dozen hours to complete, it was really annoying. I searched the internet, and finally found out about the org-duration-format variable. It allows for very flexible setting of the format in which durations are displayed (both with org-clock-display and in clock reports).
But wait, there’s more! There is also the org-duration-units variable. It is an alist, which by default contains among its entries the expression ("d" . 1440). See its docstring to learn how to change it so that it will use 8-hour days, 5-day weeks etc. (this way, 17 hours can be expressed as “2 days and 1 hour”, for instance). Cool!
Another variable I found worth customizing is org-clock-mode-line-total. By default it is auto, which means the same as all for non-repeating tasks (and I don’t usually clock repeating tasks anyway). I prefer to set it to today, so that I can see the time I spent on the current task today in the modeline. (Since my workflow includes setting minimal time spent on various things every day, this makes sense.)
And another thing I have in my setup is setting org-clock-out-remove-zero-time-clocks to t. I am not sure why this is not the default.
Happy clocking!
CategoryEnglish, CategoryBlog, CategoryEmacs, CategoryOrgMode