How many hours do you work, and how many hours are spent in meetings?

I work WFH 7.5 hours a day. Today I had 1.5 hours of meetings. The rest of the time I spent lightly sleeping, occasionally waking when a Teams message pinged and needed a response.

I always seem to be saying this on MN, but could some of these meetings be emails instead?

We work 40hrs a week and have a whole team meeting for a total for 3hrs a week, plus 1 extra hour for managers meeting.

I am a big believer in saying it in an email where possible, or just ringing someone. Far better things to do than waste my life in meetings.

I'm FT and have at most 3 meetings a week, fewer if my colleagues are busy elsewhere. They last anywhere from 15mins to 1hr30 (v rare), usually around 30m.

Stop taking work home. Prioritise and work smarter not harder. Be more efficient. What needs to get done will get done. Hold the rest. It's really not worth it.

Regards, another teacher

30hrs per week. I do 30mins per week in meetings and that is usually just a catch up with my manager where we just chat about anything but work. All business is via email.

50 hours more or less per week and about 30 are spent on meetings. I manage a team so 8 of those hours are 1-to-1s

I am a hospital consultant and work 60 hours a week. I spend 2-4h/week in meetings and they are all directly related to patient care (cancer meetings with other specialists to decide cancer staging, management and response to treatment).

As part of being a consultant we undertake other roles e.g. service improvement. I used to attend meetings with our department managers 2-3x/wk at 1-2h each time and then I stopped.

I got an email from a manager one day asking why I was no longer attending - every single meeting we discussed the same thing and we were no further forward. I raised the same points of concern, suggested various improvements, provided data/evidence and still the same discussion every week. I decided I would rather do work that was going to make a difference - get through backlog work, write letters/reports for patients etc.
The managers continued their meetings - all mainly from home, still discussing the same thing.

Two years on, some managers have moved on (career progression), new ones have started, new roles added (assistant deputy manger?!!), still the same discussions and wondering why we are in a worse position this year…. none of the issues I have raised have been addressed or my suggested solutions implemented.

So many pointless meetings by people who do not do the job, who do not understand the job, spend time viewing graphs and metrics before moving onto the next job in another department - perhaps in the same trust, perhaps a different one - rinse repeat.

I work 33 hours per week mon-thur and my average meeting schedule is

Monday - 2 hours
Tuesday - 6 hours
Wednesday - 4 hours
Thursday - 5 hours

And then there are the monthly meetings to fit in and the adhoc calls and the odd extra emergency meeting.

It sucks, most of them are not needed and I end up multitasking through those I can.

I probably spend at least 2 meetings a week discussing how we can be more “efficient & effective” FML!

The majority of my job is meetings, people telling me stuff and getting advice, then me discussing that with other people, then me checking in with original person. Then team meetings. Then 1:1s with my manager. I have very little admin to do and rarely project work

I work 35 hours a week and probably spend on average around 5 hours each week in meetings.

It depends how much prep you have to do for meetings and how much work for you is generated by them. If not a lot then easy!

Could you schedule in a meeting free day or afternoon block out for deep focus work ? I have to put 'writing up report' and block it out in my diary to stop people asking me for meetings

Yes this.

Goodness you people have a lot of meetings!

I work in the media and time is tight. We have one meeting each morning which lasts 10min max, and that's it.

37 hours. A huge amount of my job is meetings, internal and external. This week I’d say it’s been about 18 hours.

30h w/week, and I run my own non-profit. This last week, 15 minutes of meeting. Next week, 25m. I’d say most weeks are 0-30m. We’ve had a larger org meeting twice in our five year existence.

Many many meetings but a lot of the work gets done in meetings. Meetings are work.

I work around 45-50 hours a week, and spend about 35 of those hours in meetings.

I’m contracted to work 37.25 hours a week - I work closer to 70 hours and I would say at least 35 of those are meetings. Problem is, when you spend your whole working day in meetings talking about the work you need to do, you have to then do that work at some point. Outside of the meeting. Usually out of work hours.

Also I work in crisis management, which can land at any time out of hours and takes up extra time which you can never take back.

It’s mental and definitely worse since the pandemic .

Hospital?

I'd go round the bend with 20+ hours of team meetings a week!

I don't think teaching lessons can be counted as going to a meeting by any definition!

I do have lots of meetings (called conferences) with clients but it's not a meeting like you get in a business, mainly me asking them questions and finding stuff out. Maybe 10-12h of that a week. Then in quiet weeks the rest is just spent at my desk getting stuck into my work. I like to work in long bouts of 3-5 hours uninterrupted so I was never good at jobs with lots of meetings.

I wonder if virtual working has made it worse? People seem so keen to set up a teams meeting when they might not have bothered calling everyone into a room.

Contractually 37.5, in reality probably about 5 hours more on average. In terms of meetings per week I’d say maybe 20-25 on average. You just need to master the art of working in meetings, especially virtual ones.

Similar to you OP, and it sucks. Most days I'm in Teams calls for at least 5 hours, and even when I'm not back to back, quite often I'll just have 15 or 30 mins in between, during which its impossible to concentrate on anything chunky that needs doing. I'm constantly behind, and constantly pissed off. My previous job wasn't like this, it was maybe a few hours a week and a lot of days no meetings at all. I'm considering leaving as its too much, I'm actually a really hard worker but I find it impossible to be productive in this environment.

30 hours a week in a nursery.
1-2 hours a week in meetings, if that. Although to be fair it’s pretty difficult to have meetings when you’re looking after children!

37hrs a week. 5hrs a day I guess in meetings, some days less, depending what’s occurring. Is hard to get anything done.