Totalling several time spans and catching the overlaps
Meetings, tasks, travel and waiting all pile into one day, and the two things worth knowing are how many hours they came to and whether any of them collided. Paste a list with the name, start and end on each line and you get the length of every span, the total, the average, the longest and shortest span, and every pair that was open at the same moment.
How overlaps are detected, and midnight
Each span becomes a segment measured in minutes past midnight. Two segments count as overlapping when they are open together for at least a minute; a span that starts exactly where another ends is merely touching and is not counted. A line whose end is earlier than its start is read as finishing the next day, with 24 hours added, and is then compared as two pieces so overlaps straddling midnight are still caught. Measuring the elapsed time of a single pair of clock times is not what this tool does.
As of October 2026 no external table or official recommended value is used. Full date-and-time stamps, day-by-day weekly totals and break deductions are not supported, and up to 30 spans are accepted at once. A line whose start and end match would be 0 minutes long, so it is reported by line number and the calculation stops.
Frequently asked questions
Two spans overlap when they are open at the same time for at least one minute. A span that starts exactly when another ends is touching, not overlapping, so it is not counted.
They are. A span from 22:30 to 01:00 is compared as two pieces, the tail of one day and the head of the next, so it is caught against a span starting at 00:30.
Yes. Write just start,end as two fields and the span is named by its position, such as Span 1. That name is then used in the table and the overlap list.