Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?

I'm a director at my company. I spend all day, every day in meetings, with the exception of Friday afternoons. I typically spend that time just thinking about everything that happened in the week and writing down thoughts and things to deal with for the next week. I'd say 75% of those are pre-planned a week or more in advance, and the rest just pop up as people want to talk to me. I often just have to reply "If you can find time in my schedule, do so and we'll talk."

I don't have time to code these days. I don't really miss it that much, but it's nice when I do get a chance to write something.

About 1/4 of them are 1:1s, another 1/4 are leadership meetings similar reactions. I'd say another 1/4 are project planning, kickoffs, and checkins. The last 1/4 are just ad-hoc one-off meetings, often to deal with an emergency or personnel issue.

I don't mind it, generally. I actually like the face-to-face interactions with people and enjoy most of the meetings. The problem I have with it is the whole "meeting that could have been an email" thing. Especially status update meetings. Huge waste of time.

The other problem is that I do have a number of direct reports and I'm doing them a disservice by not having time to interact with them more directly. I'm in the process of hiring some more managers to take that load off my back.

I have around 18 hours per week of prebooked meeting time (1:1s, team meetings, planning, 1:1 with manager, sync meetings with different cross initiatives, interviews, candidate screening, etc).

I have observed that my biggest productivity killer are not those meetings (I try to make them useful for me and I try to make sure they are useful for everyone). The biggest problem comes when the time around them is very fragmented. For me, a week with 30 hours of meetings can be more productive than a week with 15 hours if I manage to defragment the time around them.

I have recently worked with my team and other peers to put an effort to defragment my calendar by batching predictable meetings together (this is a process I repeat every 6-12 months) and I feel an immediate boost in focus.

My rule of thumb is trying to make sure I get daily focus slots as close as possible to length X where X is:

X = ( (40 hours) - (prebooked hours in meetings) / (5 weekdays) )

In my case (40-18)/5 = 4.4 hours. I currently have two 4-hour slots monday and tuesday, a 5 hour slot on wednesday and a 3 hour slot on thursdays. Not bad. But that degrades quickly!

One 90 minute leadership meeting a week. Generally, that will be it, unless there is another issue that requires hashing something out. For my engineering team, I try to keep "meetings" at 0. Well organized asynchronous communication with the occasional slack discussion keeps things running pretty smoothly.

At one point I had 3 or 4 mandatory meetings a week, totaling 9 or 10 hours a week.

I think it was a side effect of the scrum coaches having little work to do, so we would have planning meetings with the whole team, even if nothing in your domain was on the schedule for the meeting. We also re-defined primative agile concepts every week, as in we would have to debate what a bug, task, or chore meant, every week.

When I raised the concept of meetings only involving those who it concerned, or even better, letting a workflow develop organically, I was accused of being lazy and not committed. In a lot of manager heavy orgs, the culture is that meetings are what productivity is measured by, and more visible.

Too many, and nicely spaced out to maximize the loss of productivity from context switching.

Needs "Ask HN" in subject line.

I generally have about 5 meetings a week, totaling around 3 hours. I don't enjoy meetings, but they seem somewhat productive and the burden isn't too bad.

Don't mean to hijack the thread hope the following is helpful once some replies roll in. I've been wondering about meetings + tooling + project management styles, etc too.

Here's a rough survey, should be able to see result graphs afterward submission:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfUkV2P1VxAnRSD88eU...

Raw data results link for community to look at: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1x59q4CbEGOeYirskJ7Ac...

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Main Q: ~16 hrs/week (had about 10 1:1's/week for a while)

Bonus Q: 2hrs

Me and my cofounder have only two sync meetings per week. For the rest we dogfood our own async video product [1] as we are 9 hours away in time zones. He’s in SF and I’m in Germany at the moment.

We believe in that most of things can be communicated asynchronously. For those things that strictly need to be address synchronously we keep those too slots in the week.

[1] https://standups.io

It makes sense to also post your role if you're posting your meeting hours here.

Because if you're a VP or senior director then yeah, your life is probably meetings and that's normal. If you're an engineering team lead spending 16 hours a week in meetings, well maybe not so much.

Without that info your post doesn't really tell us much, other than some people have more meetings than others :)

It's pretty horrendous. It got to the point in the fall that I had a couple days a week on average that were 100% meetings, wall to wall. I finally went through and blocked out my lunch hour and all of Friday, shoving meetings around to crowd the rest of the week so that I could have some uninterrupted time at least once a week to catch up on all the stuff I couldn't do while sitting in meetings. Even then, I still have to make exceptions into that for last-minute meetings, although at least then it's my choice to do it.

One thing I'm trying to get better about is not attending all of the weekly/bi-weekly "let's just check in with each other" meetings. If I'm not attending I let them know so they can pull me in if needed, but otherwise I make those meetings more of the "if I'm not actively engaged in deep work, I'll be there" priority level. FOMO is real, but I'm combating it with the satisfaction of seeing servers up and code running. :)

2h3 for interview and report, then 2h ~4 for other kind of meetings (sync, feature discussion, 1-1), then some mentoring sessions, 30m * 3-5.

~16h meeting every weeks. To be honest, I'm very much dislike that, but people seems to love talking more than writing detailed docs.

Enterprise Architect: 11 mandatory hours this week, and a number of regular meetings have been canceled. Optional meetings amount to around 7 hours this week; pretty light.

At my busiest, it is closer to 30 hours a week, and my longest regular meeting is a quarterly planning offsite that's ~3x 8 hour days.

EDIT: I can't say that I resent any of these, since they're simply a part of the job. My role has a component that I have come to call 'state synchronization'. I act as a bridge between multiple groups by syncing up technical knowledge, status, and blockers between the various engineering groups (and other technical leadership) who I work with.

Standups work great for small groups, but they don't scale well beyond 10-15 people.

I am an engineer (ie, IC), and I currently have about 8-12 meetings per week. At my worst I've had over 20 meetings in a week, and in a previous position (but same company), I had about 15 meetings per week. A decent chunk of these meetings are interviews, which are two meetings each (the interview itself, plus the debrief).

I'd say anywhere from 5-15 hours per week in meetings. But the real killer is the dead little "pockets" between the meetings. Hard to get any real, deep work done when your day is chopped into pieces.

As an engineering manager, it seems like the full time job is either meetings or communicating the results of those meetings to someone who can act on them. I've done some mixed roles, and I think that's the only balance that makes sense. It's also good for a manager to have empty time (i.e. they shouldn't be expected to write code or whatever).

Meetings themselves aren't so bad, but when I was a manager, our meetings would require a half hour drive somewhere, or going up to the 40th floor of some building, preparing slides, charts, and so on. Sometimes you need to bring in an expert/consultant/trainer and brief her on the project prior to the meeting.

Most of the work is around those meetings. You can have 20 hours of meetings scheduled per week, and that translates to 30-40 hours of time blocked off and 10-20 more hours of writing reports, updating Jira, answering emails, taking screenshots, and so on. If you've got a remote team, that's even more workload.

The longest meeting we've had was about 3 days long, 9-5 straight UI/UX workshop. The client balked at this at first - they have their share of meetings already, but afterwards everyone agreed it was 100% worth it. It was the only way to get a lot of stakeholders in the room, and it killed a lot of assumptions - we had UX requests that were not technically possible, UX that didn't fit user behavior, underestimated the robustness of some hacks that a dev/now engineering manager made 3 years ago, and so on.

Was doing really well on a previous team with just one (usually) or two meetings a week, got assigned to a new team with a new meeting happy PM, and now I'm lucky if I have less than 3-4 meetings a week. It's driving me fucking insane. Theres a meeting for everything, and dude spreads communication out across several email chains, slack groups and channels and even google groups.

I have 2 recurring meetings per week, standups MWF, and design sessions (I'm in software architecture). Other than that, really nothing, besides the occasional quarterly department all-hands.

My longest meetings are the design sessions. It's myself, another architect, and our director for 2 hours twice a week. However, I don't consider that a meeting as much as a productive working session.

18 hrs/wk of 1-1s incl. w/ reports, peers, and my own manager. 2 hrs/wk staff/leadership mtgs. 4-6 hrs/wk project mtgs. 4-6 hrs/wk ad-hoc mtgs.

That makes... ~30 hrs/wk of meetings. Yup, that just about matches my calendar.

Longest: the 1.5 hrs my manager and I have blocked off for our 1-1s. It doesn't always run that long, but we also often run out of time.

Edit: Role is VP Engineering

I usually have 30 or 60mins meetings totalling 2-3 hours per day. When I am the organizer I always make them 20 and 45 minutes respectively. This is a life saver for people that have meetings back to back, and at the same time we try to get things done fast. If we run out of time then I set up another 20mins meeting with even fewer people.

I'm now full time in architecture in a large international finance company which is a very different environment than what I'm used to. I'm lucky to have 8 hours a week which aren't scheduled meetings. Yes, that means I usually have at least 32 hours of schedule meetings during the 8-5 week.

I had 7 meetings in total today, starting at 8am. Almost the entire work day (8 hours) spent in meetings. I am principal engineer and usually have say in many technical discussions and decisions.

But on a light day I have around 2-3 meetings a day. One of them usually being an interview with the candidate (either phone or onsite).

I'm an engineering manager with a team of six and a cross-functional project. I seem to average 15 hours of scheduled meetings a week, plus impromptu one offs (firefighting, escalations). I find it quite draining: meetings and email don't leave a lot of time for project work. I like my job, though.

Support engineer at my current role. All meetings are pretty ad-hoc as current issues necessitate. On call rotates for a week every 4~ weeks, and there's a 15 minute systems status meeting every morning. Most days that's my only meeting.

That sounds miserable and unproductive OP :'(

> For OP, it's a twice monthly 4 hour meeting with ALL product and engineering sr. mgrs and directors - FML

This sounds pretty dysfunctional. Is that a productive meeting?

I was involved in an "all leadership" type meeting that was heading in that direction, and then we switched to a memo based meeting.

Everyone wrote their update in a Google Doc, each team had a section. The expectation was that you read the memo before coming to the meeting.

Then we had an agenda with specific time blocks for each topic, and the expectation was that you came for the topics that were relevant to you, and it was totally acceptable to come and go in the middle.

The meeting was scheduled for three hours, but almost no one came for the entire three hours, and usually we didn't have enough topics to fill it all anyway.

I hate to be that guy, but if you're looking for a simple way to defend yourself from too many meetings and/or conflicts, my startup might be interesting to you.

Our first product, https://lifeworkcalendar.com, blocks out your work calendar when you have personal events. And our next product (coming soon), https://reclaimai.com, does a whole bunch more to align your calendar to your priorities.

Email us if you're interested in a demo -- I love the Hacker News crowd and our target audience is busy managers/directors/VPs in product orgs :)

Head of Engineering of a not-so-big e-commerce company, I try to do as little as possible so unless there are some scheduled meetings my standard meeting schedule looks like this.

Once per week with CTO and once per month with every developer + QA + DevOps.

We are working toward sharing the data we have and it will show how much time engineering makers and managers spend in meetings. For fun we built a free app that shows individuals their meetings stats and how they compare within their company. And, now we are working to showcase that anonymized data and what we learned.

Example report here: https://app.shepherd.com/personal-report/sample

If you get a chance to look let me know what you think!

We hope to have the report on how it looks big picture in maybe 2 or 3 months. I'll post on Show HN when its done.

I manage managers and engineers at twitter. Most weeks are 25-30 hours of meetings.

Senior Software Engineer

* ~2 hours of 1-1s with mentors/mentees/manager (manager is weekly, others are biweekly)

* 1 hour team operations meeting

* 2 hour company-wide operations meeting that I don't have to buy enjoy attending

* 1 hour sprint planning every other week

* 1 hour demos every other week

* Another 4-10 hours worth of ad-hoc meetings throughout the week

So somewhere around 10-15 hours worth of meetings, but all of the pre-planned meetings are either very early in the day or very late in the day. The worst weeks are when the ad-hoc meetings go way over 10 hours (several design cycles lining up or several emergent emergencies that need attention), but otherwise I really enjoy it.

Architect. - currently no regularly scheduled meetings.

Sometimes I'll have a recurring meeting for a particular project, but even those end up being useless as we talk about the project all the time outside of the meetings, and we end up cancelling half of the recurring ones.

On average I'll have around 3 hours of non-recurring meetings per week (although some weeks have none).

That said, there's probably ~2 hours a day of impromptu conversing with colleagues on work topics that eats up a lot of time.

The rest of the company has the normal "waste half of the week" set of agile meetings that they attend.

I have bi-weekly 30 minute 1:1s with my chapter lead and manager. I also have a 30 minute sync every week on each of my project(s) I'm leading and daily standups with my squad.

All in all, I'm probably spending anywhere from 2-5 hours per week on meetings, on average.

Our organization is pretty distributed across a variety of timezones, so the expectation of having face-to-face meetings is not always feasible. That means project spec reviews and other planning-related discussions are typically performed asynchronously over Confluence and Slack.

I'm a technical project lead at a small consulting firm. I manage the engineering efforts of two independent projects with team sizes ranging from two to eight engineers.

I have about 8 hours of regularly scheduled meetings (standups, sprint reviews, delivery meetings) with 2-4 hours of "as needed" meetings (client sync, etc.) in a given week, with 1-2 hours of company meetings, too. This does not count one-off help sessions and "fire fights."

I am an Engineering Manager at a large Startup

I have 18 meetings a week.

I try my hardest to stack them all onto Mon and Wed, leaving the other 3 days as meeting free as possible.

I'm not a direct manager for IT but I am involved in a lot of projects at our IT department. I used to be pestered into useless meetings all the time but now I just reject them and email people over issues that should really only take 5 minutes to cover.

Now I am down to one fixed meeting a week and I sometimes accept a couple more if the topic actually needs several people in the room to discuss.

I hate meetings!

At a place I considered very dysfunctional I once had a record of 8.5 hours of meetings scheduled for the day. I went to my manager and said "we have way too many meetings" and he replied back "if you don't like meetings maybe you don't want to be a manager..."

Where I am now (generally quite functional IMHO)- I have a few monthly meetings that are an hour in length.

> how much time engineering leaders spend in meetings

Most of it, actually, if I include 1:1 meetings and job interviews too.

Regarding duration: we have an unwritten rule that default meeting for 2-4 people duration is 25 minutes. If I schedule a longer meeting - I should provide a reason.

Meeting longer than an hour and a half are counterproductive, average person just cannot keep concentrating on conversation for that long.

I would say 20 meetings per week. 10x 45min 1:1 with my team 1x 120min weekly area steerco

The remainder are not mine, forced to assist. Mostly 60 mins each. I try to join via Skype from my desk and shoot emails while people drone on.

My tip: never give more than 45 mins in your schedule. Your reports will focus more and you can use those 15 mins to take notes, to-dos

I'd say I'm lucky to get an hour a day that's free to actually do engineering work, 3 hours would be a godsend, and rare. Its definitely hard to be effective as an engineer with such little time to deeply engage. Ive sometimes thought about booking a meeting with myself to go get work done!

Not engineering side...

About 5 per week - mostly 30 mins. Beyond that it's personal style: I much prefer 1:1s to catchups over a coffee so not much meetings happening my side. If something is inconvenient I just skip it - nobody's really on my case about meetings.

>What's the longest duration meeting you regularly have?

1 hr

Engineer: In my current job, I have _one_ 30 minute meeting a week, in a company of 100 staff, and maybe 20 developers.

At worst, in a previous job, where I was the system architect, I probably spent close to 20 hours a week in scheduled meetings. My longest regularly scheduled meeting was about 2 hours.

Once per day 15 minutes, once per week a couple hours. The rest of the time I get up and go to work.

Unnecessary meetings are the bane of my existence. I want to suggest a hack to shorten meetings, and eliminate unnecessary ones: remove all chairs from meeting rooms. All meetings have to be done while standing up. No sitting on the floor or leaning against the wall.

Chief Architect.

About 15h per week, or almost half my time basically.

* ~1h daily for status meetings

* ~2h twice a week for project coordination and discussion

* ~4h once a week for overarching architecture decisions across all projects

* Various other 30min to 1h meetings depending on the week

It's terribly inefficient, but I cannot change it; believe me, I tried.

I'm the founder of a startup with 6 employees (FT/contractors) and have one 1-1 meeting every week (30 min) + a "coffee shop session" for an hour where we shoot the breeze and talk about non-work stuff.

Infrastructure architect: Five 20 minute "standups" per day, plus a seven hour meeting once a month. Add about 20 hour-long ad hoc meetings a month. Just let me do actual work dammit.

I work at a small non-profit teal organization. we have a daily standup for the engineers, but other than that meetings are rare for me. I have to go on HN to get my fix for being distracted.

My company does 6 team meetings/week. Daily 30min with dev&support. Friday it's 60min while we review the week. Not counting any ad-hoc or scheduled 1on1

I encounter about 1.5 hours of meetings per week. At my last job, that was probably around 3 hours on average. I feel fortunate after reading the comments here.

Daily standup, weekly Kanban board review, weekly review of PR's, twice per month team retro. And that's about it. And it's a big company too.

~3.5 hours. One 2 hour weekly department meeting. 10 ~ 15 minute standup each day, and finally a 45 minute sprint review & sprint planning meeting.

Senior software engineer: around 2 hours of regular meetings, plus a maybe 1 hour of ad-hoc/non-recurring meetings per week.

I’m a tech lead. If I go to all my scheduled meetings I’ll be in them about 3 hours of the day.

My longest regular meeting is 1 hour though.

At least 5 hours per week. ~1 hour long standups each day in the middle of the day. Then ~monthly 1 on 1s for an hour.

Two weekly meetings (15-30 minutes) with my current employer. And a single weekly 30 minutes meeting for a contractor.

I can’t think of a time I’ve had a meeting with more than 3 people that was useful at all.

Senior backend Dev, small team, 60ish person department:

Daily stand-up.

Weekly department.

Weekly refinement.

One or more demos per week.

One or more random meetings per week.

We have at minimum 1 per day, the daily standup, sometimes more.

Engineering Manager - Normally around 4-5hrs a day of meetings.

I'm a lead engineer for a market research data ETL & enrichment platform.

Weekly, I have...

* 1on1's with my developers and peers (30min per person, 4-6 per week)

* Standup (2x 15 min)

* Engineering leads meeting (1x 30min)

* SRE catchup (1x 1hr)

Other misc meetings...

* Engineering leads kvetch (unstructured 1hr every 2wks, cut short if there's nothing on our minds)

* My squad's retro (45min every 3wks)

* My squad's grooming (1hr every 3wks)

* Platform retro (multiple squads, 1hr every 1mo)

* BI-Quarterly KPI/OKR Planning & Review (1-2hr every 1.5 months)

* Skip-level manager meeting (1hr every 3mo)

Wednesdays are my no-meetings-slash-deep-work day. I probably invest between 1-3 hours in pairing, by request. I clean my calendar aggressively.

tl;dr ~5 hours of meetings per week

too damn many

I once worked for a small startup with 5 people and a boss obsessed with scrum and that only had experience in big corporations.

It was a remote development job with lots of meetings:

-1 hour standups daily -twice per week, 3 hour planning meetings on top of the daily standup -Friday we had a 'watercooler' meeting for an hour after the standup, where we were supposed to 'tell jokes' or 'share a funny story'. Since most of the developers were overseas and from different countries/cultural backgrounds, it usually ended up being very awkward. -twice/month we had a 4+ hour big-picture meeting on top of the daily standup

Sometimes, I would bill over half my weekly hours as meetings.

The strange part is that with all of these meetings, the tickets that would be assigned to me would be vague or filled with missing information. Even when I would have a 1-1 call with the boss to explain the ticket, she would talk in circles and could never give me the exact information I needed.

When I completed the ticket and didn't read her mind, things would have to be re-written.

I was eventually replaced by an overseas worker from India (the boss told me I was too expensive and she could hire someone from India for much less) and the company lost most of its investors within a few years.