Documenting unscheduled tasks in Org mode

A common occurrence in my daily work is to provide on-the-spot support to colleagues and/or users. These can occur in a multitude of different ways: office or mobile phone, calls via a virtual meeting tool, in person by showing up in my office, while walking to a lab, etc. Most importantly, they are unscheduled, usually short (less than 15min), and inconsequential.

I decided to develop a function to quickly document these interactions in my Org workflow. I plan to write a post (or a series) on how I use Org mode in my daily work, but suffice to say for now that my tasks, planned and ongoing, are all available in a single org file, todos.org. The main headings reflect what I consider to be my main responsibilities, and the corresponding subheadings describe individual tasks.

All these support tasks will be hosted under the heading Quick Support. I wanted something quick, so my function asks for how much time was spent, a heading title, and if I will continue to work on my last task. The first value is easy to know, but one can also estimate; the main purpose is to clock out of the current task I was working on at the correct time. The heading title is just a brief description to help me flesh out, if required, the entry later on. And since sometimes providing support really needs to be compensated with a coffee and a walk, the function asks if I will continue work or not.

Below is the function code and my keyboard shortcut:

;; Function
(defun bjf/quick-support (minutes-started)
  ;; Function to track the time spent with on the spot support, i.e. unscheduled dialogues/actiosn with colleagues. It requests how many minutes I worked on it, a title and if I should continue clokcing the last task.
  (interactive "NMinutes:")
  (save-excursion
	(let ((support-start-time
		(encode-time (decoded-time-add (decode-time) (make-decoded-time :minute (- minutes-started))))))
	  (with-current-buffer "todos.org"
		  ;; If clocked in a task, stopped it when support started
		  (org-clock-out nil t support-start-time)
		  (goto-char (org-find-exact-headline-in-buffer "Quick Support" "todos.org"))
		  (org-goto-sibling)
		  (org-insert-subheading t)
		  (insert (concat (read-string "Title: ") "\t\n:CLOCKING:\n CLOCK: "
			  (format-time-string "[%Y-%m-%d %a %H:%M]" support-start-time) "--"
			  (format-time-string "[%Y-%m-%d %a %H:%M]") " => "
			  (format "%02d:%02d" (/ minutes-started 60) (% minutes-started 60))
			  "\n:END:\n"))))
	  (if (y-or-n-p "Continue last task?") (org-clock-in-last))))

(global-set-key (kbd "C-c q") #'bjf/quick-support)

At the end of the day, I usually review these entries and assign tags, which I think reflect what was lacking from my side for the support to take place for the first time. If a task needs follow-up, I just treat it like any other one on that file (logbook, TODO state, etc.); otherwise, they are all considered close.

It is surprising how much these little pebbles of time can accumulate over the course of a month. My monthly clock report stated that 15% of my time was being spent on these tasks when I first started using this function. I use this information to create new team tasks based on the more prominent tags, which are usually something related to Documentation and Workflows. Colleagues and users definitely come much better nowadays, allowing us to not only quickly get to the core of the issue or question but also dive into alternate solutions.