a way to track it

I have kept a log of how many hours I work vs how many the uni thinks I should be working ever since I started working half time as the Laser lab manager, since they made it clear when I started that as a half time employee I need to put in the equivalent of 20 hours a week, but it is ok if some weeks are more and others less, so long as the total hours happen. Therefore I went into the uni web page showing the "Referenstidtabell" (list of how many hours an employee is meant to work each day of the year), which is a useful way to figure out where holidays are (since the list will show either zero or half the usual number of expected hours for those days). However, since the uni calculates 50% as four hour work days, five days a week, and I like having Friday's off, the first thing I did was to set up the spreadsheet with one column with the hours they expect, and another with my personal goal for the day, so that my goal could be five hour work days, four days a week (with adjustments to some days up or down, so that the total at the end of the month would match the total the uni gets for the month, since where weekends happen to fall can made a difference, with some hours becoming part of a neighbouring month if Friday's hours move to the days before Friday).

Then I set up some other columns to enter in how many hours I actually worked each day, and to calculate if I were ahead or behind of the number of hours I should have already worked in the month. I set that last column to carry the balance forward into the next moth, and, over the years I have tended to fall behind during summer and winter periods around the holidays, and catch up and get ahead in the spring and autumn.

When I did the application to be a student at Durham I added a couple of columns to the spreadsheet to track the hours I spend working on things related to my second PhD. Between the beginning of September, when I first sent Karen the letter of enquiry about the position, and the end of 2017 I worked a total of 334 hours for LTU (or two hours more than required, which nicely caught up the tiny bit I had been behind at the start of September), and 64 hours on Durham application stuff and the other "about to start" tasks, like background reading, etc. This means that my total hours in that period amounted to working 60% of full time, of which 84% of them were for my paid position.

However, going forward I will need to be working at 100% of full time (or more), and I cannot let my LTU hours drop below the 50% I am being paid for, so now I have set up formulas to track the total number of hours and calculate how they are distributed. Even though I am not yet officially enrolled, enrollment date is looming, and I have already been doing some real work towards that degree, therefore I decided to set up this tracking to count from 1 January, 2018. So far this year (including the trip to Umeå (and I always count work travel (distance, not commute) time towards the hours I am working, except for those travel hours I sleep or am doing trackable exercise, since, in those cases, I would not be traveling if not for work) I have worked 27.1 hours for LTU and 16.7 for Durham. Therefore 62% of the hours I have worked has been for LTU. However, I should have worked 34 hours for LTU by now, so I will need to catch those up.

So now my goal for work hours is fairly easy to define: Try to keep LTU at the minimum, and, when I am behind, ensure that, at least, the % of my total work hours for the month doesn't fall below 50% worked for LTU. (I rather expect there will come to be times when I work more than 100%, but so long as those times still see me meeting the LTU minimum 20 hours a week, that will be fine.)