How much time do you spend in meetings per week?

[ClaudiaWankleman]

I work a standard 40 hour week, and often spend 30-45 minutes doing work admin tasks (invoicing, updating trackers, reviewing and approving things) in the evening in front of the TV. Recently I’ve been feeling like I don’t have enough time to get through all the things I actually need to do to do the core elements of my job.

Every week, I’ve got 10 hours of standing meetings that I have to attend. I’ve not usually organised them and they aren’t always useful probably 30% useful) but we have allocated them around the team and I have to feed back to others what happened. So that’s 25% of the week gone.
Then I’ll usually have another 10-13 hours (average of the last 4 weeks) of ad hoc meetings. Again, I am not usually the one requesting these ones, but the hit rate of usefulness is usually a lot higher - 90%.

So that leaves me with 20ish hours to actually do the work I’ve agreed to do. This isn’t usually enough - I do feel quite under pressure to deliver.

Is this how everyone else feels? Pre Covid I just didn’t feel like I was talking to as many people and conversations felt slower (via email) and shorter (as everything was done desk to desk rather than a 30 minute call).

Yeah, loads, probably between 15 -25 hours a week, occasionally more. I have to admit to doing a bit of multitasking at some of the ones which aim invited to more as a representative of my department and/or where I'm only needed for a certain item and will be on mute and doing a bit of light email admin or filing or whatever while the main participants chunter on. If there's minutes or notes I can always double check any points I didn't quite catch after. It's the only way to get my job done in the hours available. Loads of people do it, you can always tell who's actually listening and who's typing away or looking at their phone!

I do have mixed feelings TBH as I do find it quite weird and rude in meetings I chair where three quarters of the participants are muted and clearly not really listening throughout, it's like talking into the void but then again I try my hardest to be very disciplined about what meetings I call and who is invited so we don't have a cast of hundreds who feel obliged to turn up but have nothing to say (and will also ask to be removed from meetings I don't need to attend). That being said my organisation does have a pretty poor culture of lots of people expecting to attend all sorts of meetings purely on the grounds of seniority/job title and not because they actually contribute and I have gotten into hot water before for simply disinviting people I see as irrelevant before, you can to go through the pantomime of sending them a lovely flowery email thanking them so much for their valued participation and expressing concern re the demands on their time and 'capacity' and suggesting ever so gently that maybe they'd prefer in future to attend 'ad hoc' or be copied in to the minutes that they'll never read bla bla bla and by the time you've bothered with all that you might as well leave them on the distribution...

My diary sucks, it is so unbalanced over the month
I dread the 3rd week of the month as I can have 6 hrs of meetings a day
I have weeded out some and decreased some to quarterly but my to do list is never clear.
I have to take a day off every month (ADO), and I need to be braver about not attending meetings rather than taking my ADO on the only clear day I have....therefore not getting any work done.
My organisation is similar with every man and his dog attending meetings but the COO is really peeling things back and an expectation that the attendee will share with their teams. One meeting has gone from 50+ attendees to 13. We have also cleaned up TOR and removed reporting by power point to a 1 pager. Fingers crossed we can shred a few others in a similar way.
I think virtual meetings have made it too easy for everyone to attend.

The last 3 months I’ve had 1 day per month without unexpected interruptions outside of my working hours. That includes weekends.

I have at least 25 hours of meetings a week, travel 2-3 days a week (nationwide) so the actual work gets done on evenings and weekends. It’s just how it is at this level in an org that operates 24/7.

In my previous job (client facing) an average of 28 hours per week, which was a mix of internal and client meetings.

In my new job (non-client facing) an average of 11 per week.

It's one of the factors which has made a big difference to my mental health and happiness at work.

I have 17 hrs of planned meetings this week over 4 days. I anticipate at least another 10 hrs of meetings coming in at last minute.

client facing roll here, looking back through my calendar I would say on average about 25% of my week in organised meetings i.e. not including calls and ad-hoc "meetings" that you get pulled into. I think working remotely has led to many people booking meetings for conversations that would have naturally come up and been resolved if they were sitting next to each other in an office.

Lately it's been 50-60% of my time, between two projects - which is exhausting, but thankfully not the norm as its usually more like 10%. DH's job requires more meeting time than even that and I wonder when it is he actually gets the work they discuss in the meetings completed!

Glad to see I am not alone.
I am in a client facing role, but not front line - the point of my role is supposed to be the technical expert who provides the client/ internal client insight that makes us the best. That requires a lot of reading and a lot of time distilling that into words/ speeches/ training/ power point slides etc. It's this part which I feel is suffering because I don't have enough time to read the 100+ pages of detail before someone needs the materials.

I agree @maxelly that it feels very rude to sit on mute with no video. I usually sit with my camera on, even in the mostly useless meetings, because of this. The knock on effect is obviously that I struggle to multitask as effectively! Pre-Covid, I would never have been in those conversations anyway, and we probably just would've waited for an email from someone before we reacted.