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

[TheGoodHuman]

I've recently started a new job. I cannot believe how many meetings I am required to attend. I work 37 hours and 20 have been spent in meetings this week. I need to get into a flow state to do some of my rather big tasks and I just can't get anything done!

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!

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.

About 20% of the time.

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

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

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.

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

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'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 🙂

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

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’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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

Hospital?

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 .

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

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

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.

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

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.