How many hours a week do your meetings really take?

Ask someone how much of their week goes to meetings and you will get a shrug and a guess. Ask them to add it up and the guess is usually low by half.

That is not carelessness. It is arithmetic done in half-hour pieces, spread over five days, with nobody keeping a running total.

Do it once, properly

Open your calendar. Take a normal week, not the quiet one and not the week of the offsite. Write down every meeting and how long it ran.

Five and a quarter hours. Against a forty-hour week, that is thirteen per cent of your working life, and none of it felt like a big commitment when it was booked.

Nothing in that list was a bad meeting. The total is still the biggest single thing in the week.

The part the total hides

Five hours of meetings does not cost five hours. A 30-minute call at 11:30 also takes the 45 minutes before it, because 45 minutes is not long enough to start anything you would mind being interrupted in.

Count the fragments as well as the meetings and the real number is worse. This is why a day with three short calls can feel like a day where nothing happened. It was.

What to do about it

• Put them next to each other. Three calls in a row costs one broken afternoon. Three calls spread out costs three.
• Give the gaps a job. An unnamed 45 minutes gets spent on nothing in particular. A named one gets spent.
• Make the number visible. You will not defend your mornings on a feeling. You might on 5h 15m.

Then stop doing it by hand

Adding up a week in a spreadsheet works exactly once. What you want is the number arriving without being asked for.

Give your tasks a category and a length, and the report does that sum every week: hours by category, as a pie, for the day, the week or the month. Meetings stop being a feeling and become a slice with a number on it.

Whether five hours is too many is your call. Not knowing it was five is the part worth fixing.