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Tool · time

What your time costs you

An hour a week looks harmless. Forty-four weeks later it is a whole working week. This form takes your estimates, turns them into annual numbers and shows, item by item, where something can be done about it.

How to read it

This is a frame, not a measurement. The tool tracks nothing and looks nowhere — it works purely with the numbers you type in. Put nonsense in and you get precisely calculated nonsense out. The value is that it forces you to say those numbers out loud at all.

The annual view is the only honest one. Nobody deals with two hours a week spent retyping data, because two hours are invisible. Eighty-eight hours a year are visible — and it is exactly the same number, just at a different scale.

Saving is not zero work. The share on each activity is your estimate of how much of it falls away once you hand it to rules, a template or AI. The rest stays: checking, exceptions, deciding. That is why the slider stops at 80 % — an activity that disappeared entirely would not be a saving, it would be a different job.

One item first, not eight. The order in the table is the order worth tackling. Take the top row, open the guide next to it and look nowhere else for a month.

Read next

The context for why time leaks and what to do about it systematically:

Time as a commodity: capacity, rate and seasonalityWhy an unsold hour cannot be sold later, and where the value of your hour comes from.Processes and automationHow to turn a repeated activity into a procedure, and a procedure into something that runs itself.Hourly rate calculatorIf you do not know what to put in as the value of your hour — work it out from the ground up.