Minute Calculator
This converts a length of time expressed in one unit into all the others. Minutes are the unit most durations are recorded in, because they are what a timer, a call log, a parking meter and a timesheet all produce, and they are also the unit least useful for reporting anything. Nobody wants to be told a task took 4,320 minutes. They want three days. The conversion is arithmetic rather than anything subtle, but it crosses the base sixty boundary twice on the way from minutes to days, and that is enough to make it worth having in front of you rather than doing in your head twice and getting a different answer each time. Enter a figure in whichever unit you have it, and you get hours and minutes as a person would say them, decimal hours for a payroll or invoicing field, and the same duration in seconds, days and weeks. The decimal hours figure is the one worth noticing: only quarter hours convert to tidy decimals, so 100 minutes is 1.67 hours rather than anything neat, and rounding that is a decision with a cost attached if you do it often enough.
Only quarter hours convert to tidy decimals. A third of an hour is 0.3333 recurring, so any rounding for payroll is a real decision.
How it works
Everything is converted to minutes first, then out again. A second is one sixtieth of a minute, an hour is 60 minutes, a day is 1,440 and a week is 10,080. Hours and minutes are the total divided by 60, taking the whole number as hours and the remainder as minutes. Decimal hours is the same total divided by 60 without splitting, which is the format a payroll or invoicing system expects.
Worked example
Take 90 minutes, the default. Divided by 60 that is 1 with 30 left over, so 1 hour 30 minutes, and as a decimal 1.50 hours. In seconds it is 90 x 60, which is 5,400. As a fraction of a day it is 90 divided by 1,440, which is 0.063, and of a week 90 divided by 10,080, which is 0.009. Try 100 minutes instead and the decimal becomes 1.67 rather than anything tidy, which is the rounding problem in miniature.
Related calculators
- Hours to Decimal: the payroll format in detail.
- Hours and Minutes: adding several durations.
- Time Between Dates: elapsed time across dates.
- Timesheet: a week of start and finish times.