Duration with a start date?

[nazarewk]

Sometimes it is relevant to tell when a period started and it's duration (I noticed periods with same summary get merged to 1, so i don't know how many #off=break i took throughout the day.

I propose following syntax:

2022-11-08
#work=Employer1
    8:30 - 17:00  standard workday
    12:00-30m #workout
    13:00-15m walking the dog
    23:00+2h #emergency 

after writing it down I noticed it might be (visually) hard to discern it from regular Range entries

This could work too, should be easier to discern:

2022-11-08
#work=Employer1
    8:30 - 17:00  standard workday
    -30m@12:00 #workout
    -15m@13:00 walking the dog
    +2h@23:00 #emergency 

Somewhat related to as it solves similar issues:

• Point-in-time entries #46
• Negative time ranges #109

[jotaen]

Thanks for sharing your ideas! I agree that the first example would look quite similar to range entries. Regarding the second one, I’m wondering what the functional difference would be to writing:

2022-11-08
#work=Employer1
    8:30 - 17:00  standard workday
    -30m @12:00 #workout
    -15m @13:00 walking the dog
    +2h @23:00 #emergency 

I.e., just putting the point in time into the summary text? That way you could capture that info, even though the notation would be “your own convention”, rather than a predefined syntax. I think a dedicated syntax would only make sense if there was a functional difference, so if that would allow klog to interpret or evaluate the data differently. But maybe I haven’t fully understood your use-case yet, so please correct me if I’m wrong here.

I noticed periods with same summary get merged to 1, so i don't know how many #off=break i took throughout the day.

Which command are you referring to here?

Regarding klog tags, I think it would be a cool and useful idea to also display the count info: #227

[nazarewk]

I'm pretty sure klog pause adds on top of the previous pause with same summary, yesterday I made 3+, but today i'm seeing just one for aggregated time

[nazarewk]

as for the value added to pauses:

• there could be accurate information (start, stop, duration) for all entries, not just ranges
• you could track how often you take breaks

alternative approach during pause giving same functionality could be:

1. split currently active range (open ended or not)
   1. stop right now
   2. insert 0m <summary> entry
   3. start a new range with same summary and same end date
2. until pause is finished:
   1. move currently active (new) range's start to now
   2. remove the entry when going over it's end date and stop tracking

[jotaen]

Ah, thanks for clarifying. Yes, klog pause indeed does add to an existing negative duration, in case its summary text is the same. (Otherwise, if the summary text is different, it would append a new entry.) Back then, when I added the klog pause command, I thought that would be useful behaviour, but I actually realize that it might be a bit confusing. So I think this could be improved: #228. With the auto-extending behaviour being optional, it would be possible to decide whether you want to extend or append.

I hope that would help already, but I’m otherwise also open to change/extend the behaviour of klog pause further.