Can Google Calendar calculate hours worked?
No. Google Calendar places events on a grid, but it never adds up their durations, and there is no total at the bottom of a week. The setting called Working hours does not count anything either. To know how many hours you worked, the durations have to be added up somewhere else: in your head, in Google Sheets, or by a tool that reads the calendar for you.
Working hours is availability, not a count
On a work or school account, Working hours tells other people when you are available, so that they book meetings at sensible times. Google describes it as a recurring weekly schedule: Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 17:00, for example. It says nothing about what you actually did. A day with three hours of client work and a day with ten both show the same working hours.
Method 1: read the hours off the calendar
For a handful of events, week view is enough: add the blocks one by one and write the total down. Past ten events, or as soon as you need a total per client, this becomes slow and easy to get wrong.
Method 2: Google Sheets formulas
Put one event per line, with the date in column A, the start time in column B and the end time in column C. Google Sheets stores a time as a fraction of a day, which explains the formulas below.
| You want | Formula in column D |
|---|---|
| Hours as a decimal number (1.5 for 1 h 30) | =(C2-B2)*24, with column D formatted as a number |
| An event that ends after midnight | =MOD(C2-B2,1)*24 |
| Rounded up to the next quarter hour | =CEILING((C2-B2)*24,0.25) |
| The total of the column | =SUM(D2:D200) |
If you prefer to keep durations as times (1:30 rather than 1.5), use =C2-B2 instead, and format the total with the custom number format [h]:mm (Format, Number, Custom number format). Without the square brackets, a total of 26 hours is shown as 2:00, because the display wraps every 24 hours.
The formulas need the events in the sheet first. The timesheet guide has a short script that copies them for any period, and the template guide adds minimum charges, amounts and monthly totals per client.
Method 3: let a tool read the calendar
Calendar Timesheet does the copying and the arithmetic in your own Google Sheets: one line per event with date, start, end and hours, then totals per client, matched by colour, calendar, a word in the title or the guest's email domain. With autopilot, the sheet updates every hour and closes each month on its own.
Four things that make the total wrong
- All-day events. A holiday or a deadline marked all day is not 24 hours of work. Leave them out.
- Declined invitations. They stay on many calendars. Count only what you attended.
- The same meeting in two calendars. Copied or shared events can appear twice. Count each one once.
- What was planned instead of what happened. If a call ran 20 minutes over, move the end of the event before you count.
Stop adding up by hand. Calendar Timesheet's free export gives you hours for any period, by colour and by calendar; Pro adds clients, rates and autopilot.