Where a 60-Hour Week Actually Goes: A Founder Time Audit

A 60-hour founder week usually splits into three piles: work only you can do, work someone else could do, and work that should not happen at all. Many owners assume the first pile is the biggest. The only way to know is to log one ordinary week in 30-minute blocks and sort every block, which is what this audit walks you through.

Key takeaways

Key takeaway

1. Log one ordinary week in 30-minute blocks, tag each block by category and as owner-only, hand off or cut, then make three changes rather than thirty.

I worked 60 to 70 hours most weeks for years as COO of Fitness Town. When I look back at what I would do differently, the answer is short: protect my own hours. I am not going to pretend every one of those hours was wasted, and I am not going to tell you that working hard is the problem. The problem is that a week that full is hard to see clearly from the inside. Memory flattens it into a feeling, and a feeling is a poor basis for deciding what to hand off.

Why audit your time at all?

Because the hours themselves have a cost, and the return on them is lower than most owners assume.

The best-known modern study of hours and output is John Pencavel's analysis of munitions workers in Britain during the First World War. He found that below a threshold of around 49 hours a week, output rose in proportion to hours. Above it, output rose at a decreasing rate. His estimates put peak output at about 63 hours, and output at 70 hours differed little from output at 56. The data is old and comes from factory work, so treat it as a direction rather than a rule for knowledge work. But the direction is hard to ignore. I cover the productivity research in more depth in long working hours and productivity, so I will not repeat it here.

The health side is clearer. In 2021, the WHO and ILO published estimates that working 55 or more hours a week is associated with a 35% higher risk of stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from ischemic heart disease, compared with working 35 to 40 hours. They estimated 745,000 deaths from stroke and ischemic heart disease in 2016 were linked to long working hours. This is coaching, not medical advice, but if you are past 40 and working past 55, those numbers are worth taking personally.

And for owners in Canada, long hours are common. Statistics Canada's quality of employment data for 2021 shows 26.4% of self-employed people usually worked 49 or more hours a week in their main job, compared with 5.3% of employees.

So the useful question is whether the hours you work are the ones only you should be doing.

Where does a founder's time leak?

Mostly into interruptions and meetings that nobody planned.

Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index analysed anonymised Microsoft 365 signals and found that people using its tools are interrupted by a meeting, email or notification every two minutes, about 275 times a day. The average worker received 117 emails a day, meetings after 8 p.m. were up 16% year over year, and more than half of meetings were ad hoc calls without a calendar invite.

That is an average across a huge number of workers, not owners specifically. Owners are likely to have it worse, because they are the person everyone interrupts. Ad hoc calls in particular never show up on your calendar, which is exactly why a calendar review alone will not tell you where your week went.

Harvard's long-running CEO time study, led by Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria, tracked 27 chief executives around the clock for 13 weeks each. The researchers have gathered 60,000 hours of data that way. The lesson I take from it for owners is the method: if Harvard needed a detailed log to understand how leaders spend their time, your own memory of last week will not do the job.

How do I run a one-week founder time audit?

Pick an ordinary week. Not a holiday week and not the week of a launch. You want the week you would describe as typical.

Step 1: Log in 30-minute blocks

Every 30 minutes, write one line: what you did. Use a notebook, a spreadsheet or a note on your phone. Log evenings and weekends too, including the email you answered at 10 p.m. If a block had three things in it, write the one that took the most time and add a tick for each interruption.

Set an alarm if you need to. If you try to reconstruct the day at night, you will underestimate the small stuff and overestimate the deep work. Everyone does.

Step 2: Tag each block with one category

Use these eight categories. They are built for owners of service and operating businesses, and they map to decisions you can actually make afterwards.

Doing the work (D) is not bad. Many owners love it, and some of it is the right use of you. The audit just makes it visible.

Step 3: Mark each block with a second letter

For every block, add one more letter:

• O for owner-only: if you did not do it, nobody could or should.
• H for hand off: someone on your team could do it, now or with training.
• X for cut: it did not need to happen at all.

Be honest with the O. The test is whether a capable person, given the information and authority, could do it to standard. They will do it differently from you, and that is allowed.

Step 4: Fill in the summary table

At the end of the week, add up the hours.

Also count your interruption ticks for the week, and note the latest hour you sent a work message each day.

Step 5: Read it with three questions

1. What share of my working hours was owner-only? If it is under half, you have room to grow without adding hours.
2. Which single category has the most hand-off hours? That is your next delegation project.
3. How many hours went to R, and did any of it happen on a weekday? If recovery only happens on Sunday, the week is borrowing from next week.

What patterns should I look for?

Every business is different, and I would rather you find your own pattern than borrow someone else's. These are the patterns I would look for first.

• Admin and ad hoc meetings take more hours than strategy and leading people combined.
• The numbers get looked at, but late in the evening, in a rush.
• Doing the work fills the gaps between everything else, because it is the part that feels most productive.
• Recovery sits almost entirely on weekends.

If you see the first pattern, your business has organised itself around you as the router. The fix is usually one manager owning one category, with written authority. I explain how to build that person in when growth outruns your managers.

What should I do with the results?

Make three changes, not thirty.

First, cut every X block that is under your control. Recurring meetings without a decision attached are the easiest place to start.

Second, pick the biggest H category and hand it to one person for 90 days, with a clear standard and a weekly check-in. Do not take it back the first time they do it differently from you.

Third, protect your own hours, starting with a floor under recovery. I use the 2% Solution with clients: 30 minutes a day, about 2% of the day, split into 15 minutes moving, 5 minutes still and 10 minutes reading or learning. It is small enough to survive a bad week, which is the whole point.

Then run the audit again in eight weeks and compare the two tables.

What if the audit says I really do need 60 hours?

Sometimes it does, for a season. Opening a location, a cash crunch or a key person leaving can all justify a heavy stretch. The danger is when the season never ends. If your audit shows mostly owner-only work and you are still at 60 hours, the real question is about the business model or the team, not your calendar. That is a conversation worth having with someone outside the business. Start with my business coaching page, and if the hours are already showing up in your sleep or mood, read the signs of founder burnout.

Next step

Run the audit this week. Then book a free 20-minute call through the coaching page and bring your summary table. We will look at it together and pick the first change.