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Comment by adulau | Hacker News Reader

Looking for a minimal time-sheet management software at work, I found taskwarrior. I was looking for something reasonable to use (not one of those "web 2.0" interfaces where you have to click on five different links to just stop/start a task).

Taskwarrior seems very handy especially when you are all day long in your terminal and don't want to interfere with your work for doing some "reporting". But there is a missing way to get the time spent on a task/project. It seems to be a recurring request: http://taskwarrior.org/boards/6/topics/79 but I haven't found any feature doing it. Beside that, it seems quite nifty.

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I feel as if I have tried near every to-do, GTD, or similar type app on the desktop and web and there is one feature that is always, without fail, missing and one that usually is.

The first is the ability to allot to a task how long it should take (E.g. Buy milk - 15m, Create wireframe for client x - 30m). The only place I have ever seen it, as far as I can recall, is Action Method.

The second is the one you mentioned.

Admittedly they are both quite similar though there is a distinct difference in usage.

Not to be "that guy", but have you tried org-mode? It has an "effort estimate"[1] feature, which lets you estimate how long you think a task will take. It's also got good time clocking features, so you can compare how close you were. I don't use it to estimate my effort, so not sure how effective or useful it is in practice.

[1] http://orgmode.org/manual/Effort-estimates.html

I've actually never heard of org-mode before. :) In order to use it, how well versed does one need to be in Emacs?

Hm. I'd have to say "somewhat well versed". org-mode was actually the catalyst that made me switch to using emacs, and the learning curve is on the steeper side. The time to overcome the learning curve may not be worth it only for org-mode, but if you were interested in checking out emacs in its own right, org-mode is a darn good reason to! :-)

You could try 'task X start' and 'task X stop', this is what we use to see how long things take. but yes, no reporting...

Nice one, for more on this see the Active Tasks section in the tutorial: http://taskwarrior.org/projects/taskwarrior/wiki/Tutorial

www.toggl.com

Toggl looks cool but it is a separate time tracking app. Think there is a real desire for an app that does both the todo management and time tracking in one.

Edit: seems that Taskwarrior does do time tracking after all. See my other comment for more on this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2597117

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