Time Tracking / Time Boxing?

[Laura H]

I've been checking out GQueues because my current task management solution has horrible options for sorting/group tasks.  Something I love that GQueues excels at.  

However, after working with GQueues for a couple weeks, I am finding the feature I miss most is a time boxing or time calculation feature.  My current program does it (admittedly with a 3rd party plug in) but it works quite simply.  In the task name, I simply use brackets to insert the time a task will take in decimal format.  [1] = 1 hour   [.5] = 1/2 hour or 30min  etc.   The plugin then totals up the numbers in [] and shows me a heading with the total time for that group of tasks.   

I am constantly over estimating how much I can accomplish in a day and setting unrealistic expectations on myself.  This simple time totalling feature has been hugely helpful for me!  When I see that I have scheduled 14 hours of tasks into my day - I know need to re-adjust!  I did not realize how much I'd come to rely on this feature until I tried GQueues and did not have a similar option.  

Is there an option I'm missing?  (I know about the calendar functionality, but the entry system is cumbersome, and only being able to assign a duration when there is a specific time of the day is far too much detail and data entry time than is realistic for my needs.)  I tried it for a couple days and found I spent way to much time dragging time bars around my google calendar.  

Is there perhaps anything in the works that might help GQueues to fill in this gap I was surprised to find I missed so much?  

Smiles,

Laura

[Cameron (GQueues Team)]

Hi Laura - 

Right now GQueues does not support time tracking or reporting.  Several others have suggested this as well though and it's on my list of improvements to make.

As a workaround, I know some people use tags to put their time estimates on tasks - but this requires they manually add up the time of all tasks in a particular queue.

-Cameron

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[Laura H]

Thank you so much for your response Cameron!  Excited to hear a feature like time tracking is on the radar screen of improvements.  I could see the tags workaround as an option - but I'm afraid I've been totally spoiled by the plug in that does an auto total.  :)

There is so much about GQueues I love, I'll keep checking in on this program and hope to jump on board when I'm able to have it work to meet my needs.

Smiles,

Laura

[Ben Edmonds]

Hi Laura & Cameron,

I know exactly what you mean - getting an overview of what you've committed to is really helpful. I've been using GQueues for a good few years now and it is a major part of my own data stores (alongside Gmail, Google Calendars & Drive). Not sure if this will help, as I don't track task time in quite the same way as you seem to. However, thought it would be worth chirping in. 

I track my hours on client and internal work (to the nearest 15mins typically). Separated across four calendars (personal / social, client hrly, client retainer, internal), I then use a fairly strict syntax to name the calendar events. I then use a free Google Calendar plugin called GTimeReport that totals up time spent. You can then view this data in browser, have it writtn directly to a new Google Spreadsheet, or download as a .xls file. (Ideally this would be a 2-way synced Google spreadsheet but that's not yet the case.) Be warned though that it's lightly supported and could break at any time.

The event name syntax is critical if you want to 'merge similar events'. It simply adds up any names that are written the same in front of a colon. I happened to use this myself already so it was a lovely little surprise when this developer had the same idea for naming events. 

ie "Client A: foo", "Client A: bar", "Client B: foo", Client A bar" = This would be treated as 3 'similar events with the first two being added together (notice the lack of colon in the last example).

Alternatively, for just a simple read-out, I just searched and found this: http://google-calendar-hours.com This views any one calendar and totals up time for a set period. Not much control, but maybe you could just check in with this as you go about your day.

Cameron, this last one is available on Github. Perhaps this could come in as a little widget to the right of search in the UI with a dropdown to choose which Queue it is counting (smart queues of course have a lot of potential here, along with the option to minus off what's been completed. Adding finer increments on duration (unlinked to a specific time) and a syntax for quick add would be welcome too. 

.ben.

[Cameron (GQueues Team)]

Thanks for the detailed example, Ben.  You have created quite the system!  Time tracking / reporting is definitely one of the higher priorities for GQueues - it sounds like it could be a really valuable addition for lots of people.  -Cameron

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[Fishy]

Hi Laura,

I wrote some code which integrates with the free Toggl time tracking software.

Software (python) and usage manuals are attached: GQ2Toggl.zip

Workflow summary:

• Create the tasks in GQueues
• Export the tasks to Toggl
• In Toggl, define time budgets for the tasks.
• Use Toggl to record how much time things actually take.

This works well for me.

Would be nice to export data back from Toggl into GQueues, but GQueues doesn't have an API for this.

[Lewis Dexter Litanzios / ldexterldesign]

Hey,

Does anyone have examples of how they're successfully using tags to time box their tasks?

Sounds intriguing...

Yours hopefully,

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ldexterldesign

Lewis Dexter Litanzios

Web Designer & Developer

+44 7504 907 304

[Lewis Dexter Litanzios / ldexterldesign]

+1

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