taskwarrior - Is it possible to report on the time spent on tasks?

Question

I'm trying to use taskwarrior to track time for billing purposes.

To do that I'm trying to generate a report showing the hours spend on each task. The standard completed report gives the Created and Completed dates but not times, so I cant see how many hours were spent on the task.

$ task completed project:test

ID UUID     Created    Completed  Age   Project Description
 - fed3daca 2019-09-29 2019-09-29 10min test    test1
 - 31a8f13e 2019-09-29 2019-09-29 1min  test    test2      

2 tasks

Is this something taskwarrior can do? Thanks

Answer 1

I don't think taskwarrior can create those reports by itself, but you could use timewarrior to do that.

After you set up timewarrior, the time spent on each task will be tracked. Example:

➜  ~ task add reply on stack overflow 
Created task 341.
➜  ~ task start 341
Starting task 81b73133 'reply on stack overflow'.
Started 1 task.
Tracking "reply on stack overflow"
  Started 2020-04-10T12:07:58
  Current                  59
  Total               0:00:01
➜  ~ task 341 done 
Completed task 81b73133 'reply on stack overflow'.
Completed 1 task.
Recorded "reply on stack overflow"
  Started 2020-04-10T12:07:58
  Ended                 09:12
  Total               0:01:14

By default you will see how much time you spent on the task. In case you start and stop the task multiple times or want to see the time you spent on a project or on tasks with a certain tag, you can query timewarrior directly:

➜  ~ timew summary 'reply on stack overflow'

Wk  Date       Day Tags                       Start      End    Time   Total
W15 2020-04-10 Fri reply on stack overflow 12:07:58 12:09:12 0:01:14 0:01:14
                                                                            
                                                                     0:01:14

This shows you the time you spent today on that task. You can also specify a time interval in case you want to see the total time spent on the task/project/tag. Example:

➜  ~ timew summary 2020-01-01 - tomorrow 'reply on stack overflow'

Wk  Date       Day Tags                       Start      End    Time   Total
W15 2020-04-10 Fri reply on stack overflow 12:07:58 12:09:12 0:01:14 0:01:14
                                                                            
                                                                     0:01:14

To see how much time you spent on project test you can just run:

timew summary 2018-01-01 - tomorrow test

This will also include the tasks named 'test' and tasks with the tag test.

Answer 2

As mentioned by Tom Dörr use timewarrior to summarize by tags.

This is the way I do:

1. Collect the tags by date range, modify the date range for your needs:
   timew tags :week
2. Remove the headings from the output:
   timew tags :week | tail -n+4
3. Use awk to separate the fiels by dash and print first field:
   timew tags :week | tail -n+4 | awk 'BEGIN {FS="-"}; {print $1}'

This results in a list of tags for the selected date range, each in one line. Now you can use a script (for example summarize.sh) to loop through these tags to summarize:

#!/bin/bash
while read TAG; do
  [ "${TAG}" = "" ] && continue
  timew summary :week "${TAG}"
done < <(timew tags :week | tail -n+4 | awk 'BEGIN {FS="-"}; {print $1}')

This way you can handle tags containing whitespace also.

At least, run a loop in shell/bash to update permanently, for example every second:

while :; do clear; date; ./summarize.sh; sleep 1; done