The tool, in your browser
Where your week actually goes
Track one real week — a messy, honest one — in half-day blocks. Write one line per block, then mark it twice: did it drain you, sit neutral, or fuel you, and could only you have done it or could someone else? The blocks that are both drain and someone-else are your trapped hours — work that wears you down and didn’t need you at all. The top three are this month’s hand-off list.
Free, and it asks for nothing. No email, no account, no sign-up. What you type stays in this browser on this device.
The week grid fills in right here in your browser. If this line stays put, JavaScript is off — the spreadsheet below does the same job.
How it gets used
- Three phone notes a day, all week. Set three alarms — mid-morning, after lunch, end of day. When one goes off, thumb-type one line: what ate the last few hours? Ten seconds. You will not sit down to journal from a jobsite, so capture on the fly and sort it out later.
- Sunday, drop the notes into the blocks. One line per half-day. Blocks you didn’t work stay blank — blank blocks count for nothing, and that’s right.
- Write the block in, or it doesn’t count. Marking the two dropdowns and leaving the line empty keeps the block out of every number on this page. A block you can’t name isn’t a block you can hand to anybody.
- Read the two marks together. Drain and someone-else is the pile to hand off first. Fuel and only-me is the other half — the selling, the tricky bid, the relationship that lands the next ten roofs. Those are the hours to protect.
- Make the hand-off list. The top three are your targets for this month: who takes each one, and the first small step to move it off your plate. The point isn’t to work more hours — it’s to trade trapped hours for best-use hours.
- Then work out who can take them. That’s the next play, and it has its own page: is this person ready to decide?
Want it in a spreadsheet?
The same grid as a spreadsheet
where-your-week-actually-goes.xlsx is this grid as a spreadsheet — the same twelve blocks, the same trapped-hours rule, the same top three in week order — for the computer at the shop. Three differences in the page’s favour: the percentage still works with the hours box empty, because trapped-over-tracked doesn’t depend on how long a block is (the file reads 0% instead); the top three name the day as well as the line you wrote; and the example day is placeholder text here, so there’s nothing to clear before you start. Three the other way: the hours box here takes whole hours only, where the file takes 4.5 if that’s really how long your blocks run (it only scales the hours figure — the percentage and the top three are the same either way); the file is a real file, so it survives a cleared browser and can be handed to somebody; and it opens on any computer you send it to. The sheets ask for your email once; this page never does.
The play behind it — M1-03 Where Your Week Actually Goes — is the capture habit and what to do with the two marks, and the sheet notes spell out every column and formula.