You've kept a log. Good. Sooner or later you'll have to turn it into a figure someone else can rely on: a lawyer, a welfare officer or evaluator, eventually perhaps a judge.
This is where most logs quietly fail. Not because the entries are wrong, but because of a decision made on day one, usually without noticing it was a decision at all: what unit are you counting in?
Choose the wrong one and you'll build months of tables around it before you find out.
Why not count days
A lost Friday-to-Monday looks like four failures if you count days.
That isn't a stronger case. It's a padded one, and it reads as padded. The first person who looks closely will say you've counted one event four times, and they'll be right. Once a reader catches one inflated figure, they discount everything near it, including the parts that were solid.
Why not count occasions
Count by "occasion" and you get the opposite problem. A lost weekend and a lost hour weigh exactly the same: one line each.
A genuinely large loss disappears into the total. "Twelve missed occasions" could mean twelve short delays or twelve lost weekends, and those are completely different situations.
Count hours
Nobody can argue that an hour is defined unfairly.
It's neutral, it's checkable against the schedule, and it weights a lost overnight more heavily than a lost hour, which is honest, because they aren't the same thing. "41 hours of scheduled contact lost since March" is a sentence a stranger can test. "She keeps cancelling" isn't.
Hours is the foundation. Three more decisions sit on top of it.
1. Group consecutive days into episodes
Keep an episode count alongside your hours. A Friday-to-Monday lost in one go is one episode, however many days it spans.
This heads off the most predictable challenge ("you've counted the same event four times") before anyone makes it. It also gives you a second, honest number: "41 hours across 6 episodes" tells a reader far more than either figure on its own.
2. Record the smallest, largest and middle loss
Totals hide shape. A pattern of small, frequent erosions and a pattern of a few huge losses can produce identical totals, and they're different cases.
So alongside the total, note the smallest single loss, the largest, and the median (the middle one when you line them all up). If you want to go further, band them by size, such as under an hour, a few hours, overnight and longer, and count how many fall in each band.
3. State your threshold out loud
If a five-minute delay doesn't count as lost contact in your method, write that down, and apply it every time.
Then say it before anyone asks. The commonest attack on this kind of evidence is "you've counted trivial delays to inflate your figures." A threshold you stated at the start, and applied consistently, answers that in one line. A threshold you invent when challenged answers nothing.
Whatever you choose, ten minutes or fifteen or thirty, the number matters less than the fact that it's fixed, written down and applied to every row.
What a row looks like
One line per scheduled period, including the ones that go fine:
- Date
- Scheduled hours
- Hours that actually happened
- What changed, and who initiated it
- Reason given, if any
- Source: the message, email or note that shows it
Two minutes per row. The hours lost for each row is simply scheduled minus actual, and the episode grouping and threshold do the rest.
Lead with the accurate number, not the dramatic one
The instinct is to reach for the biggest available figure. Resist it, hard.
A total that's been rounded up once, and caught once, discounts everything else you present. The most accurate number is slower to produce and less satisfying to write. It's also the only version that holds when someone who isn't on your side starts checking it.
Four decisions, made once at the start: hours lost, episodes not days, bands by size, a stated threshold. They decide whether your log is evidence or just a diary.
General information, not legal advice. Court process differs between countries and regions; check anything that matters to your case with a qualified lawyer where you live.
This is Chapter 5 of the workbook, and Worksheet A is the log built around it. The workbook + spreadsheet version goes further: enter each scheduled period once and it applies your threshold, counts episodes, and works out hours lost and the smallest and largest single loss for every month automatically.
See the workbook & spreadsheet