Time spent is not always time to completion
1The school magazine team is preparing a map for new members. This is an invented practice situation. On Monday, Mina spent thirty minutes drawing the map and completed it before lunch. Her partner, Sora, spent an hour checking a longer report. Sora found several unclear sentences, but she did not finish checking the whole report. The two records describe time used for different tasks, and only one of them explicitly reports completion.
2A new member tries to make both records shorter. He writes, "It took Mina thirty minutes to complete the map." Mina agrees that this preserves her result. He then writes, "It took Sora an hour to finish checking the report." Sora rejects that sentence. The hour was real within the story, but the claimed completion was not. She asks him to keep the difference between working on a task and reaching its endpoint. A correct number does not make every sentence containing that number accurate.
3The next day, Mina spends forty minutes checking captions and twenty minutes writing a title. These activities together occupy an hour. The member initially records that she spent an hour checking captions. Mina points to the title entry and asks him to match each duration to its own activity. Finally, the group checks both grammar and meaning. In a spend construction, an activity can follow the time expression in the -ing form. In their It took construction, the person follows took and the activity uses a to-infinitive. They do not use those patterns as permission to add an unreported achievement.