The model begins with the 2,080 hours for which an officer is paid in a year (52 weeks of 40 hours) and deducts hours in three stages.

1. Paid time not at work. Federal holidays, annual leave taken, sick leave used, and home leave between overseas tours. Home leave is a block of approximately 30 working days per transfer, divided over the years of the tour.
2. Training and relocation, which occur once per tour or once per career and are amortized over the years they serve: language training, tradecraft and leadership courses, short mandatory courses, and the working days consumed by a move. Relocation days are classified as administration. The remainder is time at the desk.
3. The working week. Administrative work and internal coordination, counted in hours per week and applied only to weeks spent at the desk. Applying them to the full year would count meetings during weeks spent in training.

The remainder is the substantive work of the position, termed diplomatic engagement and planning for an officer at post, consular service and casework for a consular officer, policy planning and execution for a Washington desk officer, unit training and readiness for an Army officer, and core work in the office comparison. For an officer at post it comprises the formation of a plan matched to the resources available, the engagement that carries the plan out, the reporting and analysis that returns it to Washington, negotiation, program delivery, and meetings with people outside the mission. It is calculated as a residual because it has not been measured directly: no time-use study of Foreign Service officers exists, and the administration and coordination shares are drawn from research on other professions.

Whether coordination is the work is contested. The categories used here treat clearance, internal meetings, and taskings as enabling work: they make the mission's output possible without constituting it. A different view holds that in a bureaucracy the coordination is the work, on the ground that a position that has not cleared its cable and agreed its line has produced nothing. The model does not settle the question. It states its classification, shows the hours under each heading, and carries a control that moves any stated share of internal coordination into the substantive total, so that the consequence of the other view can be read from the same figures. Two further provisions follow the same reasoning: the supervisory share of a chief's coordination is shown separately as direction and review rather than as overhead, and meetings with people outside the mission are counted as substantive work throughout.

How an hour is classified. Two questions sort an hour: whether it advances the mission’s purpose or feeds the government’s own processes, and, for the latter, whether it synchronizes people and decisions (coordination) or records and complies (administration). Activities that contain both kinds of hour are split, and the split is a control.

Direction and review. For a supervisor, part of internal coordination is the section’s product being decided, shaped, cleared, and signed. A stated share of the chief’s and deputy’s coordination is shown as a separate slice, neither overhead nor substantive work; the share is a control and no measurement of it exists.

Section mode applies the same model to a roster generated by a stated rule (one chief; a deputy by switch, on by default at seven officers; entry-level officers as a share of the remainder, one third by default; mid-level officers the rest). Officers in a role are identical because the model averages tours, training, and home leave into one year. Internal coordination is the sum of five components — section meetings, mission-level meetings, clearances and taskings at post, clearances beyond post, and internal messages — each controlled by a different level, so that a management intervention can act only on the part its owner controls. Every intervention is a displacement: it reduces one category and increases another, and both are shown. Of the net hours returned, a share set by the kind of time freed (one half for freed blocks, one third for fragments, nine tenths for added desk weeks) is counted as substantive work and the remainder refills internal coordination. Two interventions that act on the same mechanism combine by the larger effect, not the sum. Figures for the section are sums over the roster; no equivalent number of positions is stated, because a year no position can deliver is the wrong denominator.

Three optional adjustments are disabled by default. "Hours worked per week" adds unpaid hours to substantive work without adding cost, because most officers are not eligible for overtime pay and such hours do not appear in payroll records. "Interruption drag" reduces the hours to show effective time; it is not a separate category because the time it represents is already included in the others. "Fill rate" scales every category by the share of the year the position is staffed and shows the unstaffed remainder; on the cost side it scales the personal lines and leaves the positional lines.

The military comparison draws on RAND’s 2019 survey of Army company leaders, who reported a 12.5-hour day with less than one third of it spent on unit training and readiness, and on the Army War College’s 2002 finding that company commanders faced approximately 297 days of directed training against 256 available days. Its cost is the Department of Defense’s published full-cost rate for the grade, which prices the person rather than the position. For an overseas tour the build adds schooling, housing and cost-of-living allowances, and the move premium — approximately $120,000 for an O-4 with two children in Germany — bringing the figure to roughly $370,000 against the State Department’s $750,000. The remaining gap is the security and post-support layer that an embassy carries per position and a garrison spreads across thousands of people; no Department of Defense account prices it per person.

Cost. The annual cost of the position is divided by each of the three hour totals. The overseas default is the figure in the State Department's internal model for costing a new position, approximately $750,000 as of mid-2025; it assumes a senior salary and is understood internally to be a high estimate. A second basis rebuilds the cost from GAO's published line items for a specific grade for comparison.