tracking "Actual time spent" on tasks

There is a way to schedule a task and also set duration, but all of this is just a plan (=expected).

Each task currently has no information on how much time the task actually took to complete.

Note that this is different from being able to schedule tasks in the calendar and rescheduling them, because we still want to keep the information of what we planned to do.

[What I want to be able to do]

As a user, I want to track and visualize the time spent on the task so that, at end of the day, I can see:

• exactly what I spent the time on and at what time each task took place / got completed

• compare the difference between scheduled tasks/events vs. actual to get more accurate estimate of the task for the next time (calibrate my sense of estimate).

[Features that may be needed to achieve this]

I would imagine changes/features like the following would be needed:

• Tasks have a new field for tracking the actual time(s) spent

  • I said time(s) because we often complete a task in multiple timespans (work on part of the task, work on something else, and then come back)

• We have a button next to a task for starting the timer

  • Maybe the existing timer function is sufficient?

  • Basically, this timer is what gets used to increment the “actual time spent”

• Once we check off (complete) the task, actual time gets filled in

  • if we were using the timer to track the actual time, this value is used

  • If we didn’t have the timer going, we use the value of the duration and assume that duration == actual time spent and ended just now

• We can view the actual times spent on the calendar

  • It would probably be helpful to have some kind of a toggle to display/hide the actual times

  • Key is being able to compare the schedule vs. the actual

• We can edit the actual times spent on the calendar / task details screen

  • On the calendar view, we should be able to just drag the actual time displays and adjust/move the actual times. This would be useful if the recorded actual time is not accurate, the task was actually done on a different time, etc.

p.s.

I’m not putting this in the scope of this feature request, but having the value for these “actual times” would be useful for different features like weekly/monthly analysis as well, if you guys are planning on doing such things.