How long does it take to write a grant? Measure your next one

29 September 2026 · 6 min read

It depends on the funder, the size of the award, whether it is a new application or a renewal, and how much you can reuse from the last one. Rules of thumb circulate, but they describe someone else’s organization and someone else’s pace. The useful number is your own: measure one application from the day you read the guidelines to the day you submit, phase by phase, and budget the next one from that.

Why grant hours are so hard to estimate

A grant application is not one task. It is a dozen pieces spread over weeks, and most of them are small enough that nobody writes them down:

• Reading the guidelines and the funder’s priorities, often more than once.
• Drafting the narrative: need, approach, outcomes, evaluation, sustainability.
• Building the budget and the budget justification, which usually takes several rounds.
• Gathering attachments: letters of support, board lists, financial statements, staff bios.
• Internal review, where a colleague or director reads a draft and you revise.
• Wrestling the submission portal: character limits, formatting rules, uploads that fail at the last minute.

The drafting is what people remember. The rest disappears into ordinary days, which is why the number you remember and the number you worked can be far apart.

Elapsed weeks and working hours are also different numbers: a six-week runway might hold ten busy days. A plan needs both.

What to measure

Keep three numbers for one application:

1. Hours at the Mac spent on the application: reading, writing, the budget spreadsheet, the portal.
2. Hours away from the Mac: a call with the program officer, a planning meeting with the program team, a printed draft read with a pen.
3. The calendar span: the first day you worked on it and the day you submitted.

Split the hours by phase if you can. A rough split is enough: reading, narrative, budget, attachments, review, submission. After one application you will know which phase is the long one, and it may not be the one you would have guessed.

Recording the desk hours without a timer

Timers fail on grant work for a simple reason: the work comes in pieces. You fix one budget line between meetings, answer a partner’s email about their letter, and paste a paragraph into the portal to check the character count. Nobody starts a timer for eight minutes.

Punchcard is a Mac menu bar app that notices which app is in front during your day, by name only, and prints a receipt at the closing time you set: your top five apps with the time on each, the rest as MISC, and a day total. There is nothing to start or stop, and it needs no macOS permissions.

On a grant day the receipt reads like a map of the phases. A long word processor line is narrative. A long spreadsheet line is the budget. A long browser line is research or the portal. Mail is attachments and the back and forth with partners. The receipt never sees file names, window titles or the text you type, so it cannot tell you which document you had open. It gives you the shape of the day, and you add the label.

That also means it cannot tell which grant you were working on. Punchcard has no projects or tags. If a day was all grant, the day total is your number. If the application shared the day with other work, write down roughly which block it was, and check it against the CSV export: it has one row per session with a start time, an end time and the app, so “the budget after lunch” becomes a number you can add up.

If you switch on “Itemize websites” in Settings, browser time in the browsers it supports prints as the sites you used, each on its own line. For grant work that makes the funder’s portal visible, and portal time is a cost worth knowing about. Only the site name is kept, never the full address or page title.

On cost: tracking never expires and the CSV export works without a license. The first two printed receipts are free; printing after that needs a $9 one-time license.

A grant log that takes two minutes a day

1. Start a note the day you open the guidelines. One row per day: date, Mac hours on the grant, hours away from the Mac, phase, and a few words about what you did.
2. Fill in the row when the receipt prints. The top lines remind you what the day was; you only need to decide how much of it was the grant.
3. Add the calls and meetings from your calendar. Skip video calls you took on the Mac, since those are already on the receipt.
4. Total it after you submit. Hours by phase, total hours, and the number of calendar days from start to submission.
5. Save the log with the application files. When the renewal comes around, the numbers sit next to the narrative you are about to reuse.

Work that happens away from the Mac, and why the record misses it has more on counting the off-screen part honestly.

Using the number for the next application

One measured application turns planning from a hope into arithmetic. If the last one took, say, 40 hours of work and you can give grants about 10 hours a week alongside everything else, you need to start at least four weeks out, plus time for review. The figures are made up; yours come from a real application.

A few patterns are worth watching for:

• New versus renewal. Log them separately. A renewal that reuses most of the narrative is a different job from a first approach to a funder, and averaging them hides both.
• The long phase. If the budget took longer than the narrative, start it earlier next time or bring the finance person in sooner.
• The portal. If submission took an afternoon, plan an afternoon, not the last hour before the deadline.

The log also helps with the harder question of which opportunities are worth applying for. Hours are only half of that decision, since award size, fit and your odds are judgment calls, but hours are the half that rarely gets measured. How much time you spend on proposals that never get paid looks at the same problem from the freelance side.

If you write grants as a consultant for a flat fee, the log tells you what that fee works out to per hour. How to calculate your effective hourly rate on a fixed-price project walks through the arithmetic.

Questions

Can Punchcard tell which grant I was working on? No. It records app names and minutes, not projects, documents or clients. You add the label in your own log; the receipt and the CSV give you the hours to attach it to.

Does it read the application or the funder’s portal? No. Out of the box it records app names only, never window titles, document names, URLs, keystrokes or screen contents. With itemized browsing on, it keeps the portal’s site name and nothing more.

Can my team see my hours? No. There is no account, no cloud and no team feature, and the record stays on your Mac. If you want to share a day, export the receipt as a PNG or copy it as plain text.