Tracking work time

Time reporting responsibility

In my company I have a so-called "trusted working hours" contract. This means that I do not have to clock-in/out in some official Time-Tracking-System and can basically decide when I work and when not. But it's not a complete wild, wild West … there are still law and contract regulations that I have to abide to.

One of them is, that I am not allowed to work for more then 10 hours per a day. I also must have at least 11 hours brake, from when I stopped working on one day to when I resumed work on the next day. This is law in Germany, so not to be messed about.

On the other hand, my contract pays for 40 working hours a week. I do not get payed overtime. If I work more, this has to be recorded and then taken later as flex-time. Otherwise I am working more then being payed for … I do not do this.

In order to adhere to these rules, I have to (somehow) track my working hours and, if case arises, provide those logs to my company and/or law maker.

Enter Org-clock

This is my workflow for tracking work time using org-clock:

I have a capture template that creates a headline per a working day and then clocks me in. I run this once when I start working.

("z" "Clock In" entry (file+headline "~/myorg/work.org" "Stempelzeiten")
 "* %u\n"
 :clock-in t :clock-keep t :immediate-finish t)

With C-c C-x C-j I can jump to currently running clock, if I need to adjust it manually.
While doing a longer brake, I stop the clock with C-c C-x C-o. After the brake, I clock back in using C-c C-x C-x.
- If I restarted Emacs in the meantime, C-u C-c C-x C-x gives me the history to choose where to clock back in. To activate this, you have to add this to your config.
```
(setq org-clock-persist 'history)
(org-clock-persistence-insinuate)
```

Using this workflow, gives me a calculation of the working hours per a day in the modeline, so that I do not exceed 10 hours limit.

In order to get the weekly tracking (40 hours limit) setup, I use this clock table to get a calculation per a week.

Here you can see, that in one week I worked less then 40 hours and in the other one I made some overtime. At the end of every month I sum everything up and plan when to take some time off :).