Within the last 10 years, the implementation of the Bologna Process in higher education in the arts has introduced a time-based economy – the counting of ECTS points. Through a reading of protocols of self-study in the bachelor programme Dance, Context, Choreography at the Inter-University Centre of Dance in Berlin, I will show how art students are trained in accounting for leisure time as study time, for life as work. An institutionalised meritocracy is thus turning hours outside art school into ECTS points. In this note, I analyse the performativity in the protocols of the students. Protocolling working hours outside the curriculum with extreme accuracy, the students are led into what I call a meritocratic paradox: they are complicit with neoliberalism when they subject themselves to counting hours 24/7, and at the same time, some of them exercise a feminist critique of the same neoliberal economisation when they over-perform the imperative of calculation and collect grey-zone hours in their life as work. Deciphering the performativity of the protocols of self-study, I demonstrate how the infrastructural demands of meritocracy from the Bologna Process change, challenge and politicise the temporality of artistic work and the production of artistic value during artistic education.