Year-end work-hour archive from Apple Calendar
December is a terrible time to reconstruct January. Monthly exports through the year—or a disciplined December catch-up—beat folklore about “how the year felt.”
Written for Professionals doing annual reviews. Updated 2026-08-05.
December trying to remember January
A consultant wants a twelve-month picture of delivery time before planning next year’s book of business.
Folklore about how the year felt
A single mental summary lies. A single unreadable dump is unused.
Twelve monthly files if you can
Prefer twelve monthly files. If you neglected that, export month-by-month now before any calendar purge.
Catch-up without inventing history
List the twelve months
Treat each as its own export job.
Export and name consistently
YYYY-MM-workhours.xlsx pattern works.
Spot-check two random months
If those look wrong, fix process before finishing all twelve.
Optional rollup
Combine only after sources are trusted.
Annual reviews need dated evidence
Themes are fine in narrative. Capacity planning needs rough hour shapes: which quarters were dense, which clients dominated. Monthly exports feed that without fake precision.
Catch-up protocol if you waited until December
Block two hours. Export each month. Spot-check February and August. Do not try to “fix” missing weeks by inventing events—the archive should admit gaps.
Redaction for anything that leaves your folder
Internal planning files can keep names. External postmortems often should not. Export accordingly.
What I actually do in the last week of December
Coffee, headphones, twelve exports. I do not try to make the year look impressive. If August is thin because I was off, the file stays thin. An archive is a map, not a highlight reel.
If a month looks empty and I know it was not, I check whether that calendar was enabled in Apple Calendar—not whether I should invent events to “fix” the story.
Admit gaps
- Monthly discipline beats December heroics.
- Admit gaps instead of inventing history.
- Annual narrative and hour archives serve different jobs.
- Redact before external sharing.
Questions people ask
How do I archive a year of work hours from Apple Calendar?
Export each month or quarter to Excel or CSV, store the files, and optionally combine later for charts.
Should I export the whole year in one file?
You can, but monthly files are easier to validate and re-run.
Can this replace bookkeeping software?
No. It archives scheduled work-hour detail. Accounting tools remain separate.