{
  "id": "F-03",
  "url": "https://evy.so/facts/time-in-meetings/",
  "chapter": "Where the Week Goes",
  "question": "How many hours a week do people spend in meetings, and how much of it is wasted?",
  "answer": "Studies range from about 3 to 18 hours a week for the average office worker, and managers report about 22. Workers judge roughly a third to two thirds of their meeting time unnecessary or unproductive.",
  "range": {
    "low": 3,
    "high": 18,
    "unit": "hours a week in meetings",
    "display": "3–18 h a week in meetings for the average worker; managers about 22 h"
  },
  "confidence": "medium",
  "confidence_reason": "Six primary studies measure hours, and they differ by a factor of six because they count different meetings, people and methods. Every figure on wasted time is self-reported.",
  "last_checked": "2026-10-13",
  "how_to_read": "The studies count different meetings and different people. ActivTrak only sees time in online tools on work computers, so it is a floor. Microsoft publishes only its heaviest quarter of Teams users. Otter.ai's 18 hours comes from a senior, long-hours group with a median 50-hour week, and likely includes calls and one-to-ones. Seniority matters most: managers of 4 or more people report 22.2 hours against 13.7 for everyone else. Doodle, Otter.ai and Atlassian sell scheduling, transcription or collaboration tools.",
  "sources": [
    {
      "creator": "Doodle",
      "title": "The Doodle State of Meetings Report 2019",
      "year": 2019,
      "sample": "About 6,500 professionals in the UK, Germany and the US, plus data on 19 million meetings scheduled in Doodle",
      "method": "Survey with Nielsen plus scheduling data, 2018. Doodle sells meeting scheduling.",
      "figure": "3 hours a week in meetings, 2 of them considered pointless",
      "url": "https://assets.ctfassets.net/p24lh3qexxeo/axrPjsBSD1bLp2HYEqoij/d2f08c2aaf5a6ed80ee53b5ad7631494/Meeting_Report_2019.pdf",
      "quote": "The average professional spends three hours a week in meetings"
    },
    {
      "creator": "ActivTrak Productivity Lab",
      "title": "Productivity Benchmarks Report 2025",
      "year": 2025,
      "sample": "218,900 employees at 777 companies using ActivTrak",
      "method": "Observed time in online meeting and chat tools on monitored work computers, 2022 to 2024. Leaves out in-person meetings and calls away from the computer.",
      "figure": "About 38 minutes a day in digital collaboration tools (derived from the report's sector comparison)",
      "url": "https://www.activtrak.com/blog/productivity-benchmarks/",
      "quote": "Collaboration time (49 mins) is 11 mins longer than average"
    },
    {
      "creator": "David Deming, Katrine Løken, Alexander Willén and Yaling Xu",
      "title": "Meetings (NBER Working Paper 35706)",
      "year": 2026,
      "sample": "About 9,000 workers in Norway, linked to employer records",
      "method": "Survey in 2025, self-reported hours in bands",
      "figure": "Meetings take 12% of work hours, 4.7 hours a week",
      "url": "https://www.nber.org/papers/w35706",
      "quote": "consuming an average of 12 percent of work hours"
    },
    {
      "creator": "Atlassian Teamwork Lab",
      "title": "The State of Teams 2022",
      "year": 2022,
      "sample": "1,710 knowledge workers in the US and Australia",
      "method": "Online survey, July 2022, self-reported",
      "figure": "About 5 hours a week for office-only teams, about 8 hours for hybrid and distributed teams",
      "url": "https://www.atlassian.com/blog/state-of-teams-2022",
      "quote": "office-only workers have roughly five hours of meetings in an average week"
    },
    {
      "creator": "Microsoft",
      "title": "Will AI Fix Work? (2023 Work Trend Index)",
      "year": 2023,
      "sample": "Anonymized Microsoft 365 usage data, commercial customers",
      "method": "Observed Teams meeting time. Reports only the heaviest quarter of meeting users.",
      "figure": "7.5 hours a week for the heaviest 25% of Teams meeting users",
      "url": "https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/will-ai-fix-work",
      "quote": "the heaviest meeting users (top 25%) spend 7.5 hours a week in meetings"
    },
    {
      "creator": "Otter.ai with Steven G. Rogelberg (UNC Charlotte)",
      "title": "The Cost of Unnecessary Meeting Attendance",
      "year": 2022,
      "sample": "632 employees in 20+ industries, median 50-hour week",
      "method": "Voluntary online survey, summer 2022, self-reported. Otter.ai sells meeting transcription.",
      "figure": "18 hours a week in 17.7 meetings; non-managers 13.7 hours, managers of 4 or more people 22.2 hours",
      "url": "https://public.otter.ai/reports/The_Cost_of_Unnecessary_Meeting_Attendance.pdf",
      "quote": "On average, employees have 17.7 meetings (totaling 18 hours) per week."
    }
  ],
  "related_findings": [
    {
      "question": "How much meeting time do workers consider wasted?",
      "answer": "Roughly 30 to 67 percent of it, by workers' own judgment. In the Otter.ai study, employees said they could skip about 30% of their meetings (5.7 of 18 hours). Doodle's respondents called 2 of their 3 weekly meeting hours pointless. Asana's 2024 survey puts unproductive meetings at 5 hours a week, double the 2019 level. Widely shared figures such as 71% of senior managers calling meetings unproductive (HBR, 2017) measure opinion about meetings and give no share of time.",
      "sources": [
        {
          "creator": "Asana Work Innovation Lab",
          "title": "State of Work Innovation 2024",
          "year": 2024,
          "sample": "13,066 knowledge workers in six countries",
          "method": "Online surveys, February to August 2024, self-reported",
          "figure": "5 hours a week in unproductive meetings, double the August 2019 level; 9 hours in France and Germany",
          "url": "https://asana.com/resources/state-of-work-innovation",
          "quote": "doubled to 5 hours per week since August 2019"
        },
        {
          "creator": "Leslie A. Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley and Eunice Eun",
          "title": "Stop the Meeting Madness (Harvard Business Review)",
          "year": 2017,
          "sample": "182 senior managers across industries",
          "method": "Authors' survey of opinions",
          "figure": "71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient; 65% said meetings keep them from their own work",
          "url": "https://hbr.org/2017/07/stop-the-meeting-madness",
          "quote": "71 percent said meetings are unproductive and inefficient"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "question": "How much time goes to status meetings?",
      "answer": "About 4 hours a week for people who attend them, but only one study measures it, so treat this as indicative. In a 2016 Harris Poll survey for Clarizen, US workers who attend status meetings spend 4.1 hours a week in project status meetings and 3.9 hours in general ones, and those who prepare for them spend another 3.8 hours. Each average covers a different group (56 to 62 percent of respondents). In a 2015 Wrike survey, 46% said most or all of their meetings were just status updates. No study we found measures time spent writing or reading written status updates.",
      "confidence": "low",
      "sources": [
        {
          "creator": "Clarizen, survey by The Harris Poll",
          "title": "Clarizen survey on status meetings",
          "year": 2016,
          "sample": "1,120 employed US adults (plus UK and Australia samples)",
          "method": "Online survey, January 2016, self-reported. Clarizen sells work management software.",
          "figure": "4.1 hours a week in project status meetings (61% attend), 3.9 hours in general status meetings (62%), 3.8 hours preparing (56%)",
          "url": "https://www.firmenpresse.de/pressrelease449502/clarizen-survey-says-employees-in-the-u-s-waste-up-to-30-percent-of-work-week-on-status-meetings.html",
          "quote": "spending 4.1 hours each week in these meetings"
        },
        {
          "creator": "Wrike",
          "title": "2015 Work Management Survey",
          "year": 2015,
          "sample": "More than 1,400 office workers",
          "method": "Wrike's own survey, cited on its company blog. Wrike sells work management software.",
          "figure": "46% said most or all of their meetings were focused on status updates",
          "url": "https://www.wrike.com/blog/accurate-real-time-insights-with-one-click/",
          "quote": "most or all of their meetings were focused on just status updates"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "numbers_you_may_have_seen": [
    {
      "claim": "Executives spend nearly 23 hours a week in meetings, up from under 10 in the 1960s.",
      "what_the_source_says": "Repeated from article to article without an original study we could find. Otter.ai and Steven Rogelberg's 2022 survey found 22.2 hours for managers of 4 or more people, which is close."
    },
    {
      "claim": "Atlassian: 3 in 4 meetings are ineffective (\"72% of the time\").",
      "what_the_source_says": "The 72% averages six ratings, each the share of respondents who call meetings ineffective for one purpose, such as brainstorming. It does not count meetings."
    },
    {
      "claim": "Clarizen: workers spend 11.8 hours a week, up to 30% of the week, on status meetings.",
      "what_the_source_says": "11.8 adds three averages that each cover a different group of respondents. The parts are 4.1, 3.9 and 3.8 hours, for people who attend or prepare for status meetings."
    },
    {
      "claim": "The average employee spends 6 hours a week in scheduled meetings (MIT Sloan Management Review, 2007).",
      "what_the_source_says": "The article calls this a conservative estimate from the literature and names no underlying study."
    }
  ],
  "citation": "EVY (2026). How many hours a week do people spend in meetings, and how much of it is wasted? The AI at Work Fact Book, F-03. https://evy.so/facts/time-in-meetings/ (last checked October 13, 2026). CC BY 4.0.",
  "license": "CC BY 4.0"
}