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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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

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 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.

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 :)

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

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.

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!

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'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'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.

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

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.

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.

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 :'(

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.