Published September 25, 2026 · Altvina Insights · 6 min read

Where Your Hours Actually Went This Week

A one day interruption log with four columns and plain arithmetic on your own hours. It reports the fraction of your day that went to work which did not need you specifically, and no benchmark.

Open this week's calendar and find Wednesday. The blocks look deliberate. Now try to remember what actually happened between nine and eleven, and whether anything in that window ran for a full half hour without somebody needing you for a second.

Owners of small service firms can usually name every meeting they sat in. The gaps between the meetings are harder to account for, and the gaps are where the day went.

The decision you keep re-arguing was probably made in a gap

Something we keep meeting in founder-led service firms: a decision gets made, everyone nods, and six weeks later the same question is back on the table. It gets blamed on buy-in, or on people not listening, or on someone quietly going their own way.

Our own read on it, offered as judgment rather than measurement, is that plenty of those decisions were never really decided. They were settled in a gap. Someone caught you between two other things, you gave the answer that felt right with whatever happened to be in your head at that second, and it got written down as a decision.

A reflex, in other words. Reflexes are often correct, and they still do not survive contact with the first person who disagrees. There is nothing to hand over, because the reasoning was never articulated in the first place.

So the usual conclusion, that there simply is not enough time in the week, misses what is happening. Fragmented attention does not only shorten the day. It changes the kind of decision you are capable of making, and then those decisions come back around and take the day again.

A one day log, four columns

None of this is time tracking. You are not trying to account for your whole day, and you are certainly not scoring yourself against some industry figure. The single thing you are logging: every time your attention got taken by somebody else. Pick a normal day, not your worst one.

What goes in

Four columns on paper, or a note on your phone, whichever you will actually keep open.

What it was. Six words is plenty. A pricing question on a client quote.
Who it was for. Not who asked you. Who the answer was actually for: a client, a team member, a supplier, yourself.
Did it need you specifically. Yes or no. Be honest about the difference between needing you and defaulting to you.
How long it actually took. The easy mistake here is logging the length of the conversation. Count instead from the moment you were pulled out to the moment you were genuinely back inside whatever you were doing before. If a two minute question costs eleven minutes of finding your place again, the number is eleven.

Add a timestamp to each row. You will want it later.

The arithmetic

At the end of the day, five things, none of which need a spreadsheet.

Count the rows. Each row was a separate claim on your attention.
Add up column four for the whole day, recovery time included. Call that your real total.
Add up column four again, this time only the rows where column three says no.
Write down the number of minutes you actually worked, start to stop. Divide the step three number by it. The percentage you get is the piece of your day that went to work which did not need you specifically.
Look at your timestamps and find the biggest gap between two rows. Whatever that gap is, it was your longest unbroken stretch of thinking all day.

Purely for the shape of the arithmetic: a ninety minute no column against a ten hour working day lands at fifteen percent, gone on things that only reached you out of habit. Your own two numbers are the ones that matter, and we are not going to hand you a comparison, because any figure we could offer about how other owners spend their week would be borrowed and probably wrong for your firm.

What to do with the two numbers

The percentage is not the interesting part. The rows are.

Read every no row and ask who sent it. You are looking at a routing map. Requests rarely arrive at your desk by accident. A likelier explanation, offered as judgment: the path worked once, and a path that works rarely gets revisited. Four no rows arriving through the same person tells you something more useful than a time problem.

Then look for repeats. Anything that showed up twice in one day is not an interruption, it is a standing feature of your week. Your first fix sits right there, and it usually resolves to one of three things: somebody does not have the authority to answer, or does not have the information to answer, or is not certain it is safe to answer without checking with you first.

Now put your longest unbroken stretch next to the biggest decision you owe somebody next week. Twenty minutes of clear thinking against a hire, a pricing change, or whether to keep a difficult client, and you already know how that decision is going to get made. On feel, in a gap, and then again in November.

Careful with the column that feels good to cut

There is a trap here, and it catches capable people. Column three asks whether something needed you specifically. It does not ask whether it was worth doing.

Owners who go after their interruptions with a hatchet sometimes find the uncomfortable thing underneath: those small conversations were the only place information crossed between parts of the business. One person was acting as the integration layer, and none of it had been written down, because there was never any reason to write it down while you were walking past. That this client hates being called after four. That the second invoice always needs checking.

So the log is not a hit list. Read it as a map of everything your firm currently routes through one person, some of which genuinely should move, and some of which has to exist somewhere other than in your head before it can move anywhere at all.

Design problem, not a discipline problem

Time management advice will help you handle the same volume of the same requests slightly faster. A real gain, and a small one, and it leaves the routing exactly where it was.

The structural version of the question is duller and works better. Where does this kind of request land first, and why there? Who would have to be allowed to answer it, and what would they need in front of them to answer it the way you would, reasoning included and not just the answer?

Run the log for one day. Should the percentage bother you, the honest place to look is not your calendar and not your self control. Look at the design of where things arrive.

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