In addition to org's clock-in and clock-out, I also want to just be able to say "I worked on this task (arbitrary task) today for 30 minutes". And report on that.

I'm JUST beginning to learn clock-in, clock-out. It seems to me that's great if you're always at your computer AND you have the discipline to always work in a clocked-in state. But I have many little or big tasks or projects around the house that I'll work on or complete, and I'd like to be able to add to the task an estimate of the amount of time I spent on it without using the clock-in/out system. For example, today I changed my laptop battery, worked on my digital multimeter, and then checked all my batteries in my battery drawer, threw away the bad ones. I'd like to be able to just mark these tasks as DONE and also directly (and easily) add the hours worked. I might not know the exact start and end time I worked on the project, and I don't want to have to go fudge some clock-in/out time. (Unless there's a super easy way to fudge it!) I suppose it would be something like an HOURS_WORKED property. And I'd also like to be able to generate a report of all such activity/time for the day, for the week, for the month, etc. Ideally, that could somehow be combined with my clock report, but I'd be happy even if it were a separate report. Maybe this functionality is already in clock-in/out feature set? If not, is there some package or methodology that might help me out here? (I know there is ALWAYS... SOME way for anything with org mode, of course!)

Click "R" in agenda view.

Ok so I did that and it shows, what I presume to be, a report of all the clocked in time for the current agenda view. But I don't think that addresses my question. Or if it does, I'm not sure how. But in any case, perhaps I didn't explain myself well enough, so I've updated my question description above to be more clear about what I'm looking for.

You might check this out. But basically you can start a clock on org-capture, edit the clock to be the duration you want by subtracting that from the clockin time, mark it done, finish your capture and you are clocked out. [http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html#Clocking](http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html#Clocking) Clocktables are great for reports, by day week month. https://orgmode.org/manual/The-clock-table.html Here's an example Monthly \#+BEGIN: clocktable :maxlevel 5 :scope file-with-archives :block thismonth \#+CAPTION: Clock summary at \[2022-03-29 Tue 19:15\], for March 2022. \#+END: Daily \#+BEGIN: clocktable :maxlevel 5 :scope file-with-archives :step day :block thismonth :stepskip0 \#+END:

My bad for misunderstanding. If I guess correctly, you want to calculate the total time of all the time intervals in a heading. That will be using column view, https://orgmode.org/manual/Scope-of-column-definitions.html. You can just try to press "C-c C-x d" or "M-x (org-clock-display)".

I would like this functionality too… basically clocked time that is just a scalar, not tethered to particular in/out times.

[Progress Logging](https://orgmode.org/guide/Progress-Logging.html) records a timestamp and a note. You *could* put the estimated elapsed time in the note.