Teams & projects
Meeting load calculator
Count your meetings for a typical week, enter their average length and your working hours, and see how much of the week they take and how much focus time survives.
Use a typical week from your calendar. Set the switching time to 0 if you only want the raw meeting share.
How meeting load is calculated
Meeting load is the time you spend in meetings divided by your working week. Multiply the number of meetings by their average length, divide by your weekly hours and you have the share. The calculator then subtracts a small switching allowance for each meeting (the minutes spent getting to it, rejoining your task afterwards and finding where you were) to show the focus time that is really left. Dividing that by your working days gives the focus time per day.
Example: 12 meetings of 45 minutes is 9 hours. In a 40-hour week that is a 22.5% meeting load. Add 10 minutes of switching per meeting (2 hours in total) and 29 hours remain, or 5 h 48 min per day over five days. If those 2.4 meetings a day are bunched together, that 5 h 48 min can be one unbroken stretch. If they are spread evenly, the day is cut into about four gaps of 1 h 27 min each, and the length of the gaps, more than the total, decides whether hard work gets done.
| Meetings per week | Average length | Hours in meetings | Share of a 40-hour week |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | 30 min | 2.5 h | 6.3% |
| 10 | 30 min | 5 h | 12.5% |
| 10 | 60 min | 10 h | 25% |
| 15 | 45 min | 11.25 h | 28.1% |
| 25 | 45 min | 18.75 h | 46.9% |
| 20 | 60 min | 20 h | 50% |
Reading your result
There is no single right number, because the job decides it. A manager whose work is coordination may reasonably spend half the week in meetings; an engineer, writer or analyst usually needs most of the week free. Paul Graham's 2009 essay "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" describes the problem well: for people who build things, one meeting in the middle of the afternoon can ruin the whole afternoon, because the remaining fragments are too short to start anything difficult.
That is why the two block lengths matter more than the percentage. If the spread-out figure is under about an hour, try moving recurring meetings next to each other, to one end of the day, or onto two or three fixed days. Count only meetings you actually attend, include one-to-ones and recurring syncs, and use a normal week rather than a launch week. Above roughly 30%, list every recurring series, its owner and its purpose; cancelling or shortening two or three of them often returns several hours a week.
Frequently asked questions
What percentage of the week should be meetings?
It depends on the role. Individual contributors usually do best below about 20–30% so that long focus blocks remain; managers and coordinators often sit at 40–50% because meetings are much of their job.
Why does the calculator add time around each meeting?
Walking or dialling in, wrapping up and getting back into the previous task all take time that is not on the calendar. Ten minutes per meeting is a common rough allowance; set it to 0 to see only the scheduled time.
How can I get longer focus blocks without fewer meetings?
Cluster meetings back to back, keep them to fixed days or to the morning or afternoon only, and block the rest of the calendar for focus work so new invitations land next to existing ones.