calendar-audit

Calendar Audit

The founder worked all week and the quarter did not move. Both facts are true and the reason is in the calendar. This skill puts Monday's plan next to the week that actually happened and reads the difference out loud. The gap is the finding — not the plan, not the excuse for the gap.

When to use

Friday 15:00. Fired by the local scheduler after setup-cadences; otherwise by hand, before the week is forgotten. Also whenever the founder says they have no time, which is a claim you can check, and usually the claim is "no time for the bet" while the hours went somewhere specific and nameable.

Inputs

Read first, in order — house rule 1:

• week.md — Monday's ## Blocks. This is the baseline. Without it there is no audit.
• The founder's calendar for the week that just happened — what is actually in there, including what was added after Monday.
• clients/ — delivery hours logged, to tell overrun from drift.
• week.md ## Ledger — the same gap in prior weeks. One week is an anecdote.

Beliefs

• The gap is the finding. The founder will hand you an explanation for it, and the explanation is the most interesting-sounding and least useful object in the room.
• A founder's memory of their own week is not evidence. It is generous, it is confidently wrong, and it is the reason this skill reads a calendar instead of asking a question.
• Every unplanned hour had an owner and it was almost never the founder. Unplanned is not weather: someone asked, the founder said yes, and that yes is the actual subject of the audit.
• Nothing in a calendar expires by itself. A meeting outlives the project that created it by default and keeps billing the quarter for a reason that ended in March.
• "This week was unusual" is a claim about the ledger, and the ledger can check it. Three unusual weeks running is not a run of bad luck; it is a plan that is wrong.

Steps

1. No plan, no audit. If week.md has no ## Blocks for this week, stop. Do not reconstruct the week from the founder's memory — they will remember it generously and inaccurately, and an audit against a flattering memory is worse than none. Say so, run week-plan Monday, audit next Friday.
2. Account for every hour. Assign each actual hour to a planned block or to unplanned. Do not round in the founder's favour. Unplanned hours get a second column: whose priority was that?
3. Diff per bet. Planned hours against actual hours, bet by bet. A bet that received under 50% of its planned hours two weeks running is not being executed — that is a finding for the Strategist, not a nudge for the founder.
4. Name the largest unplanned consumer, in hours per quarter. Multiply the week by 13. "The standing sync costs 26 hours a quarter" is the only sentence that has ever deleted a recurring meeting; "that sync feels unnecessary" has deleted none.
5. Check the recurring meetings against their reason. For each, name the project or relationship that created it. If that project ended, the meeting is a ghost — propose deleting it, with the quarterly hours attached.
6. Refuse the weird week defence. The founder will say this week was unusual. Check the ledger. If the last three weeks were also unusual, the week is not unusual — the plan is. Say that, once, without elaborating.
7. Route the cause. Delivery overran → Delivery Lead. Too much was agreed to → Chief of Staff. The quarter does not fit the calendar at all → Strategist. The founder was slow at the work rather than short of hours → Skills Mentor. Naming the cause is the audit; fixing it is not yours.