Over at the Straightforward Emacs channel, Jake B. has an informative video on Org mode clocktables. Most Org mode users knows that you can clock in and out of Org headings giving you a way of tracking the time you spend on various tasks. That’s really handy if you’re charging for your time or if your employer requires a periodic report on the time you spent on various jobs.
That’s great but there’s much more. You can at any time generate a clocktable that will list the total time spent on each task and show a breakdown of the various times spent working on each task. Again, this is pretty well known but it turns out it’s possible to configure a clocktable in various ways to get the exact information you need displayed in the way you need it to be displayed. That includes specifying a time block—such as today, yesterday, thismonth, etc—to delimit the data included.
Jake B walks us through all that starting with a simple default table for a single heading. He uses that to show some of the configuration options and then moves on to generating a table for the whole file. Finally, he shows two ways of including data from more than one file. The first way specifies each file individually while the second is a tiny bit of Elisp that shows how to include any file matching a regular expression using directory-files-recursively.
The video is 11 minutes 47 seconds long so it shouldn’t be too hard to fit in. It is, in any event, well worth the time to view it.