Org Clocking and Idle Time

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) posts some useful information on Org mode clocking that I didn’t know. If you’re tracking your time on a task with Org mode clocking, it’s easy to forget to stop the clock when you finish or get interrupted. That can distort your task time because it adds time to the clock when you weren’t actually working on the task.

Of course, this is Emacs so there’s a solution. It turns out that Org has the notion of idle time—configurable, naturally—that notices when you’re not doing anything with Emacs¹ and will present you with a menu when the idle time exceeds the configured limit. The menu asks you what you want to do about the idle time. You could just ignore it, stop the clock, subtract the idle time from the clock, or various other actions. See mbork’s post for the details. He also has a link to the relevant Org manual page so that you can see all the options.