This would also enable efforts to be assigned as roles.

This was one of the first things I tried to do and I was disappointed that it wasn't possible. It would be very useful to me for a similar reason as the original poster's.

I also vote for this idea. My first use for this: a category called "Could have been delegated", to know how often I find myself doing something that I shouldn't.

I vote for this idea. I work on various projects. Sometimes I work home. I would like to be able to sum up all work that has been done home. I would like to be able to tag my efforts, sothat I can filter all efforts that have this tag.

There is a partial work-around. If you make a separate task to hold efforts for each category, then this will work. For example, you could have a "travel" task, and have separate tasks for each onsite item separate from items that are otherwise similar but are not onsite. Then you can filter an effort viewer by category tag to see the efforts.

But I see why that isn't as flexible as just marking efforts with category tags.

And actually, I just thought of a big reason why this request could be even more valuable:
If we also create a system to allow efforts to be loose (not contained in tasks), just like how notes are already, then users could track *spontaneous efforts* — efforts that are for things they didn't prepare a task item for. These efforts could be assigned categories still to make sorting easier.

Furthermore, this goes with this idea:
http://taskcoach.uservoice.com/forums/26465-desktop-version-windows-linux-mac-of-task-coach/suggestions/343818-keep-efforts-when-sub-task-is-deleted
And see my comment there. But instead of only moving efforts to parent tasks, the feature could move efforts from any task to just being loose efforts but automatically maintain the category tags from the task and keep them with the moved effort.

Loose efforts would just be viewable, as now, in an effort viewer, along with the efforts from within tasks.

I should make this a separate request, but I'm just commenting here for now.

@Jacob, I don't agree that this duplicates the report builder request.

This is more or less a duplicate of 26465, "add report builder or parameter based effort reports".

This is exremely important for me as well, and the single reason I would switch to TaskCoach (I've been using ToDoList by AbstractSpoon, Makiga, and ThinkingRock before). I would like to sum up used effort per category and week. Selecting a single category in a category viewer does only effect task viewers, not effort viewers (probably on purpose). Possible use: according to my contract I should spend 50% time on Management and 50% of my time on development tasks. I group everything into projects (which include both), and cannot easily see how much time per week I've spent on each category.

It would help to implement either
o a link between category viewer and effort viewer so only efforts for the selected category are shown (and summed up), or (better)
o a view option "effort per category and week" in the effort viewer dropdown box, or
o colums "Effort per category" selectable by right click, similar to the "effort per weekday" columns (the two should probably be mutually exclusive), or
o filtering on columns in the effort viewer.

Thankyou, Jacob.