Effort spent on a incident

[pavankum]

I am adding a field called Effort spent on the from and i have to update manually how much time i have spent on the incident before assigning it to some one else.
here the same process continues until the incident resolved. what i need to do it to show cumulative total.
for example: if assigned 1 works for 2 hrs and update the incident before assigning it to other person and assigned 2 will work and update the field with 3 hours after update it should show 5 hrs.

[erion]

Are there any adverse effects to pausing this timer be default?   We are about to implement this field in order to get some KPI reports but the biggest dislike has been the automatic counter when you view a record.

[apg1]

We implemented with an extra table that takes manual time entered (a few years ago).
We found that reporting and obtaining a total time for one record was not easy.
Also because of the amount of data we are dumping into this custom time table it can be a bit tedious pulling the reports.

We are now trying to roll back to out of the box using the time_worked field and just adding the table as a related list so we can updated the time if it is required retrospectively (that way the total time will update to).