Info Catalog org: Clocking work time org: Dates and Times org: Relative timer

org: Effort estimates

 
 8.5 Effort estimates
 ====================
 
 If you want to plan your work in a very detailed way, or if you need to
 produce offers with quotations of the estimated work effort, you may
 want to assign effort estimates to entries.  If you are also clocking
 your work, you may later want to compare the planned effort with the
 actual working time, a great way to improve planning estimates.  Effort
 estimates are stored in a special property ‘Effort’(1).  You can set the
 effort for an entry with the following commands:
 
 ‘C-c C-x e     (org-set-effort)’
      Set the effort estimate for the current entry.  With a numeric
      prefix argument, set it to the Nth allowed value (see below).  This
      command is also accessible from the agenda with the ‘e’ key.
 ‘C-c C-x C-e     (org-clock-modify-effort-estimate)’
      Modify the effort estimate of the item currently being clocked.
 
    Clearly the best way to work with effort estimates is through column
 view (Column view).  You should start by setting up discrete
 values for effort estimates, and a ‘COLUMNS’ format that displays these
 values together with clock sums (if you want to clock your time).  For a
 specific buffer you can use
 
      #+PROPERTY: Effort_ALL 0 0:10 0:30 1:00 2:00 3:00 4:00 5:00 6:00 7:00
      #+COLUMNS: %40ITEM(Task) %17Effort(Estimated Effort){:} %CLOCKSUM
 
 or, even better, you can set up these values globally by customizing the
 variables ‘org-global-properties’ and ‘org-columns-default-format’.  In
 particular if you want to use this setup also in the agenda, a global
 setup may be advised.
 
    The way to assign estimates to individual items is then to switch to
 column mode, and to use ‘S-<right>’ and ‘S-<left>’ to change the value.
 The values you enter will immediately be summed up in the hierarchy.  In
 the column next to it, any clocked time will be displayed.
 
    If you switch to column view in the daily/weekly agenda, the effort
 column will summarize the estimated work effort for each day(2), and you
 can use this to find space in your schedule.  To get an overview of the
 entire part of the day that is committed, you can set the option
 ‘org-agenda-columns-add-appointments-to-effort-sum’.  The appointments
 on a day that take place over a specified time interval will then also
 be added to the load estimate of the day.
 
    Effort estimates can be used in secondary agenda filtering that is
 triggered with the ‘/’ key in the agenda (Agenda commands).  If
 you have these estimates defined consistently, two or three key presses
 will narrow down the list to stuff that fits into an available time
 slot.
 
    ---------- Footnotes ----------
 
    (1) You may change the property being used with the variable
 ‘org-effort-property’.
 
    (2) Please note the pitfalls of summing hierarchical data in a flat
 list (Agenda column view).
 

Info Catalog org: Clocking work time org: Dates and Times org: Relative timer