Budgeting time

[Fredrik]

Hi,

I'm testing if cli-ledger could by a good way of handling time reporting and some time planning as well. I know there are some timereporting functionality which could be useful but I'm more considering using time as a value in the following way :

• Everyday we get 24 hours to spend
• Every workday I owe my employer 8 hours
• Every year I get 20 days vacation ( 20*8 = 160 hours)
• Every day I spend my time in different categories (working, training, studying, netflixing, cleaning)
• Weekly I budget time working out
• Monday 2 hours (but I only trained 1 hour)
• Wednesday 1 hour (which I did)

This makes me thing  that using a ledger for this might be idea but being a beginner I'm struggligng especially with the budget functionality. 

Is anyone tracking time like this and can give any hints? Or can someone tell me how to budget an amount for a specific day and then track how reality matches?

I'm thinking that I want to track the following :

• Work time spent and the time difference compared to 8 hours in a work day (keeping track of overtime work)
• I want to see I budgeted 3 hours working out for a week but only did 2
• I want to see time I spent per category

So any ideas how to set this up?

[o1bigtenor]

On Sat, Aug 17, 2019 at 2:35 PM Fredrik <fredrik....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm testing if cli-ledger could by a good way of handling time reporting and some time planning as well. I know there are some timereporting functionality which could be useful but I'm more considering using time as a value in the following way :
>
> Everyday we get 24 hours to spend
> Every workday I owe my employer 8 hours
> Every year I get 20 days vacation ( 20*8 = 160 hours)

Faith

> Every day I spend my time in different categories (working, training, studying, netflixing, cleaning)
> Weekly I budget time working out
>
> Monday 2 hours (but I only trained 1 hour)
> Wednesday 1 hour (which I did)
>
> This makes me thing that using a ledger for this might be idea but being a beginner I'm struggligng especially with the budget functionality.
> Is anyone tracking time like this and can give any hints? Or can someone tell me how to budget an amount for a specific day and then track how reality matches?
>
> I'm thinking that I want to track the following :
>
> Work time spent and the time difference compared to 8 hours in a work day (keeping track of overtime work)
> I want to see I budgeted 3 hours working out for a week but only did 2
> I want to see time I spent per category
>
> So any ideas how to set this up?
>

I'm not always a 'normal' kind of person so I'll take a crack at it.

I would treat it like a set of purchases.
Expenses - hours (maybe minutes or maybe 0.1 hours)
Assets - 24 hours
Liabilities - - - various functions (things spent time on

I see a problem with the amount of time spent inputting data - - - -
for my tastes.
That's a common problem in any very detailed system - - - - finding it
on my own enterprises.
I'm spending a significant time logging and transferring and I really
would rather not
be a slave to my system - - - - I want the system to work for me (its not yet).

Dunno if any of the above is useful - - - - sorry.

Regards

[Fredrik]

Thanks for the ideas! I have played around with it a bit and this is what I got currently.

So every day we get 24h to spend which can be set up with the following entry :

2019/08/16 day 1
    Assets:Hours           =24
    Equity:Hours

The equal sign is to clear out any remaining hours from the day before so the next day will look the same :

2019/08/17 day 2

    Assets:Hours          =24

    Equity:Hours

If this is a workday I "own" my employer 8 hours of work :

2019/08/16 Workday

    Liability:Work       8

    Assets:Hours

2019/08/17 Workday

    Liability:Work       8

    Assets:Hours

I can of course spend my time with other things I want to track also :

2019/08/17 Other things done

    Expenses:Workout    1

    Expenses:Study      2

    Assets:Hours

And regarding those hours I could have already budgeted the day to plan it out :

~ daily in 2019/08/17

    Expenses:Work        8

    Expenses:Workout     2

    Expenses:Study       2

    Assets:Hours

So now I can run some reports to check that budget :

ledger -f test.ledger --unround -E budget

                      13                      -12                       25 -108%  Assets:Hours

                   14.25                       12                     2.25  119%  Expenses

                       2                        2                        0  100%    Study

                   11.25                        8                     3.25  141%    Work

                       1                        2                       -1   50%    Workout

------------ ------------ ------------ -----

                   27.25                        0                    27.25     0

And my overall balance :

 ledger -f test.ledger --unround -E balance

                  13  Assets:Hours

                 -32  Equity:Hours

               14.25  Expenses

                   2    Study

               11.25    Work

                   1    Workout

                4.75  Liability:Work

--------------------

                   0

[o1bigtenor]

Interesting - - - - but you're forgetting some important time users
1. personal care (shower/bath/toilet/nail cutting/hair cuts/shaving)
2. personal care (clothing maintenance/home/maintenance/vehicle maintenance
3. people time (relationships are very important!!!! they take time
(and should!!!!))
4. for others (time on belief systems/political/more)
5. personal (internal dev't (you have study but what about
emotional/spiritual?)
6. waste time (time not book to enable one to 'flow' with life)
(don't want to get too stressed if you happen to have a
meeting run late - - grin!)

Too tight a scheduling will make things institutional, not enough
results in sloppy
habits and little getting done - - - - I think the trick is somewhere
between the
extremes. Maybe more an acknowledgement of what you need to get done and
then a flexibility so that life is also savored.

Hopefully this hasn't gone way off the deep end of OT!

Regards

[Fredrik]

For me this is more about tracking time where I can use the outcome.

So for work I have flextime so if I work an hour overtime one day I can leave earlier an other so I have an interest in keeping track of that.

For my personal life I see it as a combination of planning/motivating to budget time for a day or week or so and then follow up if I actually spent the time as I planned.

The rest of the time I will not bother tracking as it will take too much effort and I can't see a reason for tracking it.

[Fredrik]

Saying the things above I realized I can simplify my ledger a bit more :

2019/08/16 Workday so we will have a debt

    Workdebt                                       8

    Life

2019/08/16 Working so will remove some debt

    Work                                           7

    Life

2019/08/16 Other things

    Study                                          4

    Workout                                        2

    Life

~ daily in 2019/08/17

    ; Challenging myself to increase my time in certain areas

    Study                                          5

    Workout                                        2

    Life

2019/08/17 Another workday

    Workdebt                                       8

    Life

2019/08/17 Working and getting ahead

    Work                                          11

    Workdebt

2019/08/17 Free time usage

    Study                                          3

    Workout                                        3

    Life

So now I can run some reports to see my time spent :

ledger -f test.ledger -E balance

                 -35  Life

                   7  Study

                  18  Work

                   5  Workdebt

                   5  Workout

Looking at this I need to work 5 hours to reach zero in debt with my employer.

Checking the day I planned I can see the following : 

ledger -f test.ledger --begin 2019/08/17 -E budget

                -14                  -7                  -7  200%  Life

                  3                   5                  -2   60%  Study

                  3                   2                   1  150%  Workout

So I'm a bit ahead in working out but lagging with my studies.