Finding gaps

Find Gaps looks through your working hours for time that nothing is recorded for. This topic covers opening it, setting your working days and hours, how far back it looks and the shortest gap it reports, and filling the gaps it finds.

Opening Find Gaps

Open the main menu and choose Find Gaps. It looks at your own time, from the start of the first day it covers up to now.

Across the top, a summary says which days and hours count as working time, how many days it looks back, and the shortest gap it reports. Choose Change to adjust them, and Hide when you’re done.

The list keeps itself up to date while it’s open: as you record time, filled gaps drop out, and as time passes, new ones appear.

Working days and hours

Find Gaps only counts time inside your working hours. Outside them, nothing is a gap.

• Working days: choose a day to turn it on or off. At least one day stays on.
• From and To: when your working hours start and end on those days.
• Add Hours adds another set of hours to the same days. Leave lunch and breaks out by splitting the day into more than one set of hours. It’s unavailable once your last set of hours ends within an hour of midnight.
• Remove These Hours takes a set away, as long as another one is left.

Your working days share the same hours here. If they currently have different hours, Find Gaps tells you, and changing the hours gives every working day the hours you set.

Your working days and hours are saved in the workspace as soon as you change them, so they’re there next time. Until you change them, they’re the workspace’s defaults, which come from the preset it was set up with, if the preset has them, or Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., otherwise.

How far back

Days to Look Back sets how many days Find Gaps covers, including today. Today only counts up to now.

Shortest gap

Shortest Gap leaves out gaps shorter than this. Enter hours, minutes and seconds, as in 0:05:00.

Days to Look Back and Shortest Gap aren’t kept: each time you open Find Gaps, they start at 14 days and 0:01:00.

Reading the results

If there are no gaps at least as long as Shortest Gap, Find Gaps says Nothing is missing. Otherwise, it shows how many gaps it found and how much time they add up to, then each day, newest first, with:

• How much time is missing that day.
• A strip showing the day’s working hours with its gaps marked. Hover over a gap to see when it starts and ends.
• A row for each gap with its start, end and length.

Time you’re timing right now counts as recorded, so it never shows up as a gap.

Filling one gap

Choose Fill beside a gap, or click the gap in the day’s strip. Grindstone opens the timeframe editor, titled Fill Gap, on the gap and any slice that runs right up to either end of it. Paint the gap with what you were working on, or stretch a neighboring slice across it, and choose OK. See Fill Gap for how the editor works.

Filling several gaps at once

Check the gaps that were all spent on the same thing, or choose Select All, then choose Fill Selected (the button counts how many you’ve checked). In Fill Gaps:

1. Under Fill with, choose what the time was spent on. Search for it, or choose New Work Item to create one. If you choose a work item you aren’t assigned to yet, filling assigns you to it.
2. Optionally choose Details to fill in notes and other fields. What you give here goes on every slice.
3. Choose OK.

Each gap becomes its own time slice. If some of that time has been recorded since Find Gaps found the gaps, Grindstone shows an error and fills nothing.