A week has 168 hours in it and most students could not say where ninety of them went. Classes, a shift, the bus, meals, sleep, and then it is Sunday night. The gap between what you planned and what actually happened is usually not a discipline problem, it is a bookkeeping problem.
This tool does the bookkeeping. You enter your fixed commitments, rate eight areas of your life from 1 to 5, and it splits whatever is left into a week you can actually picture — a stacked bar of all 168 hours, a table of hours per area, and a ladder that shows what gets protected when time runs short.
It is opinionated on purpose: health and rest have minimums you cannot rate away, study is sized from your credits and target GPA, and everything else competes for what is left.
See how your 168-hour week really gets split. Enter your fixed commitments, rate your life areas from 1 to 5, and get a visual priority map that shows where your time should go — before you run out of week.
Fixed Weekly Commitments
Rate Your Life Areas (1 = lowest priority, 5 = highest)
How the hours get divided
First the fixed column: classes, work and commute straight from your inputs, plus sleep at hours per night × 7 and daily needs at hours per day × 7. Subtract those five from 168 and the remainder is your free hours.
Next, each rating becomes a protected minimum: a rating of 1 protects 0 hours, 2 protects 1, 3 protects 2, 4 protects 3, and 5 protects 4. Two areas get floors on top of that — health and fitness never drops below 3 hours a week, rest and downtime never below 5, whatever you rate them. Study gets its own rule: 2.5 hours per credit if your target GPA is 3.7 or above, 2.0 if it is 3.0 or above, 1.5 otherwise.
Two situations follow. If free hours cover the minimums, the surplus is shared out in proportion to the square of each rating, so a 5 pulls 25 units of it and a 1 pulls 1. If they do not fit, study keeps its full number and every other area is scaled down by the same factor.
A worked example
Leave the defaults alone and press Generate My Priority Map. Sleep 7 a night is 49 hours, daily needs 2 a day is 14, plus classes 15, work 10 and commute 5: 93 hours fixed, leaving 75 free out of 168.
Every area is rated 3 by default, so each protects 2 hours, except health at 3 and rest at 5. Study protects 15 credits × 2.0 = 30 hours. Minimums total 48, which fits inside 75, so 27 spare hours are shared out: each of the eight areas gets 9/72 of it, or 3.375.
The result reads study 33.4 hours a week (4.8 a day), rest 8.4, health 6.4, and 5.4 each for relationship, friends, family, hobbies and career, with 75 hours accounted for in total. The ladder puts sleep, classes and health in Tier 1, everything rated 3 in Tier 3, and hands you five reflection questions at the bottom.
When the week does not fit
Push the defaults to a heavier term: 8 hours of sleep, classes 18, work 20, commute 8, and 3 hours a day of meals and chores. That is 123 hours fixed and 45 free, against minimums of 48. Study keeps its 30, the other 15 are shared across the remaining seven areas at 83% of their minimum, so friends read 1.7, health 2.5 and rest 4.2 instead of their rated numbers.
Take it further and the tool stops being gentle. Free hours below 10 trigger an overcommitted warning telling you something has to give. Fixed commitments above 168 stop the calculation entirely, pointing out that you ran out of week before the model even started.
Read both as a plan to cut something, not as a failed calculation. The real test is a week from your own calendar, because a map of hours you wish you had is an easy way to avoid changing anything.
Other tools
- Queen’s GPA calculator — put a number on the study hours you are protecting
- Readability checker — for the essays filling those blocks
- SAT superscore calculator — if part of the week is test prep
Frequently asked questions
Why is study protected before everything else?
Because it is the one area with an external deadline attached to it. Study is sized from your credits and target GPA, so when free hours run out it keeps its full number and the discretionary areas share the cut. Change your credits or target and watch it move.
What do the floors on health and rest mean?
They are minimums applied after your rating. Rate rest 1 and it still protects 5 hours, because a preference should not schedule zero recovery for a whole term. Everything else, including relationship and hobbies, follows your rating exactly.
What happens if my fixed commitments go over 168 hours?
The calculation stops and tells you the total, with a note that you ran out of week before the model started. The useful response is to move one input — fewer work hours, a shorter commute, less sleep — and regenerate, because the tool cannot invent hours you have already spent.
How is the leftover time decided?
By the square of each rating. With everything rated 3 the eight areas split the surplus evenly, but raise one area to 5 and it carries 25 units against a rating-1 area’s 1, which is 25 times the pull. Your top-rated areas absorb most of the slack, which is the behaviour you want from a priority map.
How often should I rebuild it?
At the start of every term, when credits and shifts change, and then roughly monthly to check drift. The interesting comparison is never between two maps — it is between this one and the week you have been living.