Org Tempus

Time management is a tricky business. Ideally we should spend our precious time in Earth doing things that we’re interested in for as long as we want. Unfortunately that’s not how the life of a modern human works. We have responsibilities, chores, busy work, etc. We have activities that we enjoy doing, and tasks that we have to get over, and ideally we should make progress in all of them. We’re in a constant state of context switching. Additionally, we need to take regular breaks to ensure our brain is not overly engaged.

As an Emacser, I’m an avid user of Org Mode. I find it essential to keep track of my perennial list of tasks, both personal and at work. Org has a handy clocking feature that allows you to track the time you spent on each task. This feature is essential to ensure I don’t overwork, or underwork, in any of my responsibilities. However, it’s a bit of a hassle to clock in and clock out all the time, particularly if you take regular breaks.

Enter Org Tempus, an Emacs package I’ve written on top of Org Mode to automate many parts of my workflow. In particular, Org Tempus allows setting up a default task to auto clock-in when activity is detected in the workstation. This default task is how I track administrative work: catching up with emails, messages, and capturing new work items. How “activity” is detected is configurable and extendable: it can be activity coming from Emacs itself, or activity coming from a desktop environment such as GNOME. The package also permits setting intervals for breaks (similar to the Pomodoro technique) and total worked time, and sends notifications when the thresholds are reached.

Overall, Org Tempus has enabled me to be more intentional with how I spend my computing time. Check the README for the full list of features. I’ve just released version 0.0.2.