Cats & Code

I am working on building an after-work schedule, but didn’t want to do everything manually on paper. A quick Google spreadsheet would be perfect for this. It will keep all my data organized and automatically compute time changes so I can experiment to find the most efficient and practical schedule for myself.
However, after creating my outline, I found out that there isn’t a simple technique or formula available in Google Docs for adding time (or even dates for that matter). But I did manage to find a partial answer on StackOverflow. Google stores it’s dates as floating point values that appear to represent hours. This means that multiplying the number of hours in a day (24) by the number of minutes in an hour (60) will give me the floating point  value that represents the number of minutes I need to add.

So here’s what I did:

Adding minutes to a Google spreadsheet

The formula looks like this:

=<original time>+(<# of minutes to add>/(<number of minutes in an hour> * <number of hours in a day>))

In more simple terms:

<time next task begins> = <time previous task begins> + (<number of minutes task takes to complete>/<total minutes in a day>)