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Entering Spent Time

We hope that you will use AAP and in particular enter time spent for the activities every day or almost every day, as we ourselves do. Therefore we tried to do the process of the time entering as easy and smooth as possible. As usual we consider the example first.

Suppose that you would like to enter spent time for Work. To enter the time is very easy in itself: just activate the cell in the intersection of row Work and column Hours spent in. and type the time. However immediately the questions might arise:

  1. To what date the entered hours correspond?
  2. How to change this date if necessary?
  3. How make so that in typical situation there would be no need to change this date at all, and wee could just type time, may be not even checking what the date is?
Let us try to answer these questions in the same order
  1. The date, to which you enter the hours, is given in the header of the column to input (Sat, Apr 15 in the sample image above). It is also given in the more detailed form higher: in Active Day row (Sat. Apr 15 2006 in the sample image). For your convenience in "Today:" row the current date is also visible (Sun, Apr 16 2006 in the above sample).
  2. Probably the simplest way to change the date to input for (Active Day) is to click toolbar button or sufficient amount of times. You can also use the calendar for long "jumps" in time.
  3. It would be boring to change Active Day every time when you would like to enter the spent time. To avoid this you can arrange so that at the start of AAP the default Active Day that will be always either today or tomorrow. If you just have installed AAP the default starting active day is yesterday. It is convenient for those who prefer to enter the spent hours in the morning of the next day. You can change the default starting active day with Option dialog box that can be opened with item Options of menu Help. Choose "today" if you prefer to input hours at the evening of the same day or "yesterday" if you prefer input spent hours in the morning of the next day. If you will follow your choice and input spent time regularly you will rarely bother what Active Day AAP shows and rarely change it.
Another feature that facilitates to enter the spent time in AAP is that you need not remember exact time spent for an activity. You can relax and concentrate on activity itself, not trying to remember or calculate how much time you have been spending for it. Our advice is to forget that you will input hours in AAP while you are involved in activities of everyday life. The precision with what you will be able to remember the spent time at the end of the day or tomorrow morning is most probably enough. AAP will forgive and forget the small errors in the input time.

After all these preliminarily remarks, the bottom line of which is that usually you should not bother about the details because AAP "bothers" about them for you, let us proceed at last with our example and input time for activity Work. To make the input less trivial let us imagine that we indeed input spent time for Saturday and because it was Saturday our work scheduler was free. Let us imagine that we worked about 2 hours 40 minutes in the morning and 3 hours 30 minutes in the evening. After you activate the cell in the intersection of row Work and column Hours spent in. as in image above type 2:40+3:30 (or 2.40+3.30) and press Enter key. You will see 6:10 in the input cell. AAP have made calculation for you.

Note that in this version, if you enter minutes alone, you still must explicitly type 0 for hours. For example if you would like to enter 12 minutes you should type 0.12 or 0:12

You have learned how to enter the spent time. In the next lesson we discuss probably the most interesting part of the tutorial: how to use priorities, calculated with AAP to decide what to do first. But why these questions have arisen? Isn't it clear that we should do what has higher priority? Well, in general it is indeed so, but in real life the small deviations from the scheduler are common and natural. It means that you should not put attention to small differences in priorities and their small deviations from normal value. The real question is how high should be a priority to deserve you attention and what difference between priorities can be consider as significant. As usual AAP has several features that facilitate the answers to these questions. 

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