Budget Monthly Mentoring Hours Against Your Advisory Cap — Free
A 45-minute mentoring call actually takes an hour once you review drafts beforehand and send notes afterward. Add per-session preparation time to every recurring commitment and see your true monthly mentoring load in hours.
The proof surface
Onboarding-buddy tools count how many buddies a team needs for incoming hires. This totals one advisor’s monthly mentoring hours across cohorts, including hidden prep and follow-up time per session.
Why the flat version breaks
Counting only calendar call duration
Context switching, document review and follow-up notes add 25 to 50 percent to every session.
Saying yes to weekly calls by default
Bi-weekly sessions with written async prep often deliver better progress at half the calendar load.
Overcommitting across multiple cohorts
Five separate mentees can quietly consume a full working day every month.
How to work the mentorship cadence indexcard
Enter every recurring mentee, office-hours slot or project group you support during a month.
Four 45-minute sessions with junior engineers looks like three hours on the calendar before preparation time is added.
Set the minutes spent reading pull requests, CVs or action items around each call. Fifteen minutes turns each 45-minute session into a 60-minute commitment — four hours per month.
The index card sums total monthly hours and flags any single row above four hours so you can shift from weekly calls to fortnightly or group office hours.
What the mentorship cadence indexcard replaces
| Question | Before | Visible working |
|---|---|---|
| Counting only calendar call duration | Context switching, document review and follow-up notes add 25 to 50 percent to every session. | Record monthly frequency and live call duration |
| Saying yes to weekly calls by default | Bi-weekly sessions with written async prep often deliver better progress at half the calendar load. | Add honest prep and follow-up minutes |
| Overcommitting across multiple cohorts | Five separate mentees can quietly consume a full working day every month. | Cap heavy single-cohort commitments |
A local arithmetic aid replaces hand calculation, not expert review. No paid AI service is needed.
Run it on the samples, right here
FIRST-LOAD
Input is processed locally and a draft is saved automatically in this browser profile when storage is available. Reset to sample clears that draft; Pro history has its own clear button. A state link encodes your inputs in its URL: share only non-sensitive rows. Browser history, clipboard and anyone receiving the link may retain it. Optional AI use below leaves this device; it is not required.
Time-budgeting arithmetic from session counts and durations you supply. Not HR policy or workload advice; align formal mentoring allocations with your team’s expectations.
Data note: Everything runs in this browser tab on the mentorship cadence indexcard: your mentee cohort | sessions per month | minutes per session stays on this device, nothing is uploaded, and the reading is rebuilt only when you press run.
Go deeper: the companion app files the same reading as a index card with a stamped header
The article demo above runs without limits. The companion app keeps a local history, exports the rows as CSV, prints the mentorship cadence indexcard reading, and holds your drafts on this device — one free run, then $ 4 one-time for the layer that keeps filing.
The mentorship cadence indexcard reading is complete for free. The optional $4 layer adds print, row CSV and the last five local reading summaries; it does not add hidden answers. Checkout is not configured yet; the article demo remains unlimited.
Open the budget monthly mentoring hours against your advisory cap companionBoundary
Time-budgeting arithmetic from session counts and durations you supply. Not HR policy or workload advice; align formal mentoring allocations with your team’s expectations.
What this is built on
- Method: Set the minutes spent reading pull requests, CVs or action items around each call. Fifteen minutes turns each 45-minute session into a 60-minute commitment — four hours per month.
- All sample records are invented examples. The app does not fetch measurements, policies, files or personal records.
- Google’s official pricing page, fetched 2026-09-29, lists free-tier access including AI Studio. Optional formatting only; limits and availability can change. Free-tier content may be used to improve products. Never paste private records there.
Before: Context switching, document review and follow-up notes add 25 to 50 percent to every session. After: the mentorship cadence indexcard shows the working beside each named row so the reader can change the assumption and inspect the consequence.
Optional AI formatting, not calculation
For this mentorship cadence indexcard, use the free AI Studio interface only if available to you, with no paid API key. Manual entry completes the same workflow for free. Supply only fictional or non-sensitive notes. Review its output against the source; never paste unresolved questions into the numeric rows.
Format my non-sensitive notes for a mentorship cadence indexcard. Return plain rows only: mentee cohort | sessions per month | minutes per session. Preserve supplied quantities exactly. Do not guess missing values; list questions separately. Do not calculate or add advice. I will check every row before pasting into the local tool.
Accepted schema: mentee cohort | sessions per month | minutes per session. No AI response is executed as code.