[emacs-wiki-discuss] planner-mode for contractors (multi-layered planners?)

[micah milano]

Hello,

I use planner-mode to keep track of todo items and projects for
different clients that I do work for, as well as my personal tasks.
This works well, except when I want to give those clients a view into
what I have been working on, what needs to be done, how much time I
have spent, and when my availability is. All these things exist in
planner, but I cannot think of a way to make them work in the way I
need so that they are useful to the clients.

Right now I just publish certain project pages that are related to a
client into different areas that each client has access to. However, I
don't want them to have a view into the other projects, so I don't
publish my day pages along with those project pages, and those links
just are broken. But the day pages are really useful, I would like to
be able to allow a client to see a day page that is restricted to their
projects, so I can publish that day page, and the individual projects
that are associated with them. Additionally, I would also like to have
(for my own planning purposes) a master day page that I work from,
containing all the different projects and tasks.

Goals:

. Client can look and see what I worked on today, and how much time was spent on each task
. Client can look at the different project pages (associated with that client) to see what needs to be done
. Master day page that allows me to see how much time I spent on each client, and what I did for each
. When I planner-task-in-progress on a task, that task gets added to
the project-specific day page, as well as the master day page
. I want to allow each client to have a "status update" that shows
which tasks I worked on, and for how much time. Seeing each day's tasks
and time spent is useful, as well as giving a weekly summary of what I
worked on and how much time I spent (and accomplishments).

Possible solutions:

. use the method called "Working with more than one planner project" described by RaymondZeitler
at http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/PlannerModeContrib (but this
only allows for two plans, and the timeclock isn't properly separated
and wouldn't have a master daily page)
. run two different Emacs programs (seems insane)
. ask on the mailing list to see if anyone knows what to do
. learn lisp