time management calculations when there are constant interruptions

[bird lover]

I'm a solo law practitioner, having used access 2003 and its predecessors on
xp for many years. I don't know vdb. I created a basic todo-done form which
works well for me.

As for time management, right now, I have two fields, [start] and [finish]
for the specific todo-done record, i.e. I start at 2:00 pm, end at 3:45 PM,
and subtract the time. The problem is I am constantly interrupted from one
task to work on 'something else', sometimes three or four 'something else's'.
Hours later, I then must come back to the original task. I want to set up
something, where I can track time on each of the mini tasks. I don't want to
reinvent the wheel.

a. Can someone recommend any access based programs for time management which
allow for interruptions. Microsoft's "Time and How Much Has Elapsed" doesn't
cover interruptions, ie. jumping back and forth.

b. Anyone have suggestions on how to set it up. I am not a computer
professional.

c) Anyone know of commercial time programs that interface directly with
access data, especially programs catering to people who charge for time.

 

[Jeff Boyce]

I guess what I'm not clear on is why, if you already have a way to add a
record for "ProjectA" from Date/Time1 to Date/Time2, you don't just add a
record for each of the interruptions as well? That way, you'd potentially
have multiple records per day, per Project, but you could use a Totals query
to sum them up by day, week, whatever...

What am I missing?

Regards

Jeff Boyce
Microsoft Office/Access MVP

 

[Fred]

We do exactly what you describe, and do it as Jeff describes. Just to
clarify, there is a field which specifies what specific item the time was
spent on. We have dropdowns for some common repeated ones (i.e. Lunch, hous
spent at the water cooler etc. )

BTW, the hardest part isn't the DB part, it's having to record the times
for each "switch"/interruption, and what task or activity was commenced at
the time of the switch. I've been trying to buy a large bottle of
WillPower in order to actually get that done, or buy a mind-reading computer
so that we don't have to.