How many hours a week do people spend in meetings, and how much of it is wasted?
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.
- Medium confidence
- 6 primary sources
- 2019 to 2026
- Last checked
Every study on one scale
Chart values as text
- Scale: hours a week in meetings. Shaded range: 3–18 h.
- Doodle (2019): 3 h
- ActivTrak (2025): about 3.2 h (online only)
- Deming et al., Norway (2026): 4.7 h (12%)
- Atlassian (2022): 5–8 h
- Microsoft (top 25%) (2023): 7.5 h
- Otter.ai / Rogelberg (2022): 18 h (managers 22.2 h)
Why medium confidence: 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.
Sources
| Study | Creator | Year | Sample | Method | Figure | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Doodle State of Meetings Report 2019 | Doodle | 2019 | About 6,500 professionals in the UK, Germany and the US, plus data on 19 million meetings scheduled in Doodle | Survey with Nielsen plus scheduling data, 2018. Doodle sells meeting scheduling. | 3 hours a week in meetings, 2 of them considered pointless “The average professional spends three hours a week in meetings” | assets.ctfassets.net ↗ |
| Productivity Benchmarks Report 2025 | ActivTrak Productivity Lab | 2025 | 218,900 employees at 777 companies using ActivTrak | 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. | About 38 minutes a day in digital collaboration tools (derived from the report's sector comparison) “Collaboration time (49 mins) is 11 mins longer than average” | activtrak.com ↗ |
| Meetings (NBER Working Paper 35706) | David Deming, Katrine Løken, Alexander Willén and Yaling Xu | 2026 | About 9,000 workers in Norway, linked to employer records | Survey in 2025, self-reported hours in bands | Meetings take 12% of work hours, 4.7 hours a week “consuming an average of 12 percent of work hours” | nber.org ↗ |
| The State of Teams 2022 | Atlassian Teamwork Lab | 2022 | 1,710 knowledge workers in the US and Australia | Online survey, July 2022, self-reported | About 5 hours a week for office-only teams, about 8 hours for hybrid and distributed teams “office-only workers have roughly five hours of meetings in an average week” | atlassian.com ↗ |
| Will AI Fix Work? (2023 Work Trend Index) | Microsoft | 2023 | Anonymized Microsoft 365 usage data, commercial customers | Observed Teams meeting time. Reports only the heaviest quarter of meeting users. | 7.5 hours a week for the heaviest 25% of Teams meeting users “the heaviest meeting users (top 25%) spend 7.5 hours a week in meetings” | microsoft.com ↗ |
| The Cost of Unnecessary Meeting Attendance | Otter.ai with Steven G. Rogelberg (UNC Charlotte) | 2022 | 632 employees in 20+ industries, median 50-hour week | Voluntary online survey, summer 2022, self-reported. Otter.ai sells meeting transcription. | 18 hours a week in 17.7 meetings; non-managers 13.7 hours, managers of 4 or more people 22.2 hours “On average, employees have 17.7 meetings (totaling 18 hours) per week.” | public.otter.ai ↗ |
How much meeting time do workers consider wasted?
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.
| Study | Creator | Year | Sample | Method | Figure | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| State of Work Innovation 2024 | Asana Work Innovation Lab | 2024 | 13,066 knowledge workers in six countries | Online surveys, February to August 2024, self-reported | 5 hours a week in unproductive meetings, double the August 2019 level; 9 hours in France and Germany “doubled to 5 hours per week since August 2019” | asana.com ↗ |
| Stop the Meeting Madness (Harvard Business Review) | Leslie A. Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley and Eunice Eun | 2017 | 182 senior managers across industries | Authors' survey of opinions | 71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient; 65% said meetings keep them from their own work “71 percent said meetings are unproductive and inefficient” | hbr.org ↗ |
How much time goes to status meetings?
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.
| Study | Creator | Year | Sample | Method | Figure | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clarizen survey on status meetings | Clarizen, survey by The Harris Poll | 2016 | 1,120 employed US adults (plus UK and Australia samples) | Online survey, January 2016, self-reported. Clarizen sells work management software. | 4.1 hours a week in project status meetings (61% attend), 3.9 hours in general status meetings (62%), 3.8 hours preparing (56%) “spending 4.1 hours each week in these meetings” | firmenpresse.de ↗ Press release as republished by Marketwired; the Clarizen site no longer hosts it. |
| 2015 Work Management Survey | Wrike | 2015 | More than 1,400 office workers | Wrike's own survey, cited on its company blog. Wrike sells work management software. | 46% said most or all of their meetings were focused on status updates “most or all of their meetings were focused on just status updates” | wrike.com ↗ |
Numbers you may have seen
These figures circulate widely. Here is what the original source says.
- Executives spend nearly 23 hours a week in meetings, up from under 10 in the 1960s. 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.
- Atlassian: 3 in 4 meetings are ineffective ("72% of the time"). 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.
- Clarizen: workers spend 11.8 hours a week, up to 30% of the week, on status meetings. 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.
- The average employee spends 6 hours a week in scheduled meetings (MIT Sloan Management Review, 2007). The article calls this a conservative estimate from the literature and names no underlying study.
More from Where the Week Goes
- F-0119–25%How much of the work week do knowledge workers spend searching for information?
- F-0253–61%How much of the work day goes to coordinating work rather than doing it?
- F-0420–26 minHow long does it take to get back to a task after an interruption?
- F-0513–28%How much of the work week do knowledge workers spend on email and chat?
- F-063–4 hHow much time do people lose switching between apps at work?
- F-074.6–5.7 hHow much time do people spend redoing work that already exists?
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