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

I’m a lecturer. My contracted hours are four days (28h) and I’m timetabled to teach about 18h. I have a one hour team meeting fortnightly, then meetings with students from my classes on an ad hoc basis. I do one day a week WFH and try to schedule those then on Teams.

I try not to work on my day off, but always pick up and reply to messages and depending on where we are in the academic year might do marking too.

36 hours a week. Approx 1.5 hours (of a 12.5 hour shift) are spent in 'board rounds'. So 4.5 hours weekly.

I work around 37.5 - 40 hours and spend around 5 ish hours in meetings.
Sometimes more Sometimes less

I'm a teacher (secondary Head of Dept) and usually, I am in school 7.15am - 4.30pm (or similar), so roughly 45-50 hours a week depending on when I leave.

I teach 20 hours a week, plus I have my form which is another 3 hours 45 a week, taking me to 23hrs 45 minutes contact.
I do a lot of duties at break/lunch as I am leadership, so another 3.5 hours.
So, probably 27.5 hours contact.

Then 2 hours CPD meeting each week, 1 hour department meeting per fortnight, 1 hour a fortnight with my line manager, 2 hours a fortnight with people I line manage. So, 4 hours a week.

Not too bad overall but my free periods are my PPA/management time and because they are spread out across the week, I can't get everything done in them so do work at home. A lot are spent on things like lesson visits in my department which I obviously have to do in school hours.

I do really enjoy it though 🙂

40 hours a week and about one third of my time is meetings. They are active involvement meetings so a lot of the rest of my time is also planning for, organising and following up on meetings. I also find that there are so many topics and projects that when I do get a stretch of focus time I don't know what to start with. The whole dept has half a day blocked in all our calendars where we are not supposed to organise any internal meetings - to help us carve out focus time (and it does help).

I have Team Leads under me and they do/oversee the actions coming out of each of my meetings

I used to be the same so I started declining meetings that were non-urgent / critical. I probably decline well over 60% of meeting invites. Most can be an email, and I only respond to emails between 9:00 and 10:00 and 16:00 and 17:00 and these times are blocked out on my calendar.

You have to have some guts to push back against 'urgent' meetings though - as the old saying goes, if everything is urgent then nothing is urgent.

I also religiously block out 1 hr for lunch.

I actively block out slots of 2-3 hours in my calendar so people can’t put meetings in.
i don’t understand how people get things done when they’re in back to back meetings.

Depends on time of year but I can spend 80% of my time on calls…between that & emails, no time to do actual work!

20hrs. Zero meetings.
I'm admin so have no say in anything.

About 20% of the time.

2 half time jobs making up 37.5 hours plus a normal amount of overtime. Between 5 and 6 hours a week in meetings, so around 20% max. That’s actually more than I thought it was.

My hours vary but a working day for me is 8hrs and I'd say on average I'd spent a third-half of that in meetings. Although some days less and some more. As another PP alluded to it then makes it almost impossible to actually do any actions assigned from all the meetings!

Yes it will be teaching lessons

I work in IT and I used to work for a major public institution. I wrote some code to analyse everyone's calendars as they wanted to understand the meeting culture. I can't remember the exact figures but we found out the average employee was spending around 3/4 of their time in formal meetings. One of the good outcomes of that was a executive directive that gave everyone the right to refuse to attend meetings unless they definitely had to be there which I used a lot!

40hrs a week, zero meetings. I’m not important enough to be invited!!

Well my job mainly consists of meeting with people, so at least 50% of it is meetings. But in terms of regular departmental meetings, it averages out to be about 3 hours per week.

Currently only work around 10hrs a week with no meetings but in previous 40hr week role was 0-4hrs a week in meetings. But I worked in care so not an office type role

Both for me. As soon as I try to do something else I will be asked a Q 😂😂
My dept is the most high profile dept in a heavily regulated sector so that's why I need my input in most meetings and why I have to be engaged and ready for Qs/challenge etc

Camera on at all times!

Are these meetings that you have to actively participate in? Or ones where you have to watch a lot of people talking. Are they camera on or off? Have you mastered the art of working while in a meeting? On certain meetings I we all can be seen tapping away while still listening in.

Almost no meetings, I work 24hrs/week

But in a previous ft job they were pretty much constant. I had to block out my calendar or I'd never get a lunch break.

Legal auditor working 21 hours a week. I have a 30 minute catch up with my manager once a week. That’s it.

I work four days a week. About 20 percent in calls or meetings. Much easier with teams calls and two days wfh to get work done. Also I chair nearly half of those I attend and this helps. None of this waiting for people to join for two or more minutes and people nearly always are on time.

I clerk meetings so going to meetings is sort of my main focus of my job. But i spend about a third of my time in meetings. A third is minutes and follow ups, the other third is setting up meeting packs and company secretary type compliance stuff.

Yeh that 100% doesn't work. I campaigned for 2 Leads to be under me as I can't attend that many meetings AND complete actions. Thankfully I got the Leads and they then oversee the actions I get from each meeting. On most days it's a well oiled machine 😂
I work in a highly regulated sector so I have to be visible in every meeting.