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Tool

Time audit

Everyone gets 168 hours a week. Budget yours across the categories that matter, then log a real day in half hours and see how far the two drift apart. Everything stays in this browser's local storage.

The week

19 hours unassigned
In the week
168
Hours, every week
Budgeted
149
Across your categories
Left over
19
Still unassigned
Committed
108
Locked categories

Reality check: committed time takes 108 hours, which leaves 60 hours a week, about 8.6 a day, that you actually choose. You have named 41 of them, so 19 are still unspoken for.

Categories

Hours per week
33%
24%
3%
4%
8%
2%
8%
6%

The padlock marks committed time: sleep, paid work, the commute, the chores that do not do themselves. Everything unlocked comes out of the hours you actually decide.

How to audit a week

Start in Budget mode and write down where you think the week goes. Sleep first, because it is the largest single block and the one people quietly borrow from. Then paid work, the commute, the chores. Lock those with the padlock: they are committed time, the part of the week you do not really choose. Whatever the counter shows after that is your actual discretionary budget, and it is usually both smaller and larger than expected. Smaller because the committed blocks are bigger than they feel, larger because almost nobody guesses they have thirty odd hours a week of their own.

The 168 hour frame is Laura Vanderkam's, from her book of that name. Her argument is that a week, not a day, is the right unit for this. A day is too short to hold a life: any single Tuesday can be a write off, and comparing Tuesdays makes you feel like a failure. A week is long enough that the exercise, the reading and the two evenings with friends all fit somewhere, and short enough that you can still remember it.

Then log a real day

Switch to Log a day and fill in the half hours of the day you just finished. This is the part that changes minds. Researchers who collect time diaries have found for decades that estimates and diaries disagree, and they disagree in a flattering direction: people who claim the longest working weeks overstate them by the widest margin, and the hours that go missing from the estimate usually reappear as television, phone or unaccounted time. The tool cannot tell you which of your numbers is wrong, but it can put them side by side.

Log yesterday rather than today, in one sitting, and guess when you have to. A diary that is roughly right beats an estimate that is confidently wrong. Two weeks of honest logging will teach you more about your schedule than a year of feelings about it, and the whole exercise costs about three minutes a day.

What to do with the gaps

Read the comparison as information rather than a verdict. A gap between budget and log is not a moral failure, it is a mislabelled hour. If scrolling comes in at three times its budget, the useful question is which category it is stealing from, because that is the thing you said you wanted. Move the budget to match reality where reality is fine, and move reality to match the budget where it is not.

Then change one thing. Auditing a week and changing nothing is a hobby. Pick the single largest gap, adjust one recurring block, and log another week to see whether it held. The time blocking planner is where that change becomes a plan.

Frequently asked questions

Why 168 hours instead of a daily schedule?

Because a week is the smallest unit that contains a whole life. Everything that matters happens somewhere in a week: work, sleep, exercise, people, chores, rest. Judged daily, most of those look neglected on most days. Judged weekly, you can see whether five hours of exercise or one evening with friends genuinely fits, and the answer is usually yes, in a slot you were spending on something else.

How many days do I need to log before this is useful?

One day is a hint. Three or four days tell you which categories are systematically wrong. A full week, including a weekend, is the real thing, because weekends behave nothing like Wednesdays. This tool keeps the fourteen most recent logged days and averages whatever you have, so the numbers get steadier as you add days.

What if my week is nothing like the last one?

Then log more than one. Irregular weeks are exactly the case where estimates fail worst, because memory averages towards the week you meant to have. If you work shifts or your childcare rotates, log a full cycle rather than a calendar week, and read the categories rather than the day.

Is my log stored anywhere I should worry about?

No. Categories, budgets and logged days sit in this browser's local storage under one key, on this device. There is no account, no sync and no server call, which also means clearing your browser data clears the log.

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