And it's not just engineers, managers and upper management are constantly trying to solve the problem of "too many meetings".

Well, I have the data, let's see if we can uncover what the real problem is with meetings.

tracking time at work series - Next Topic

Sometimes I do fruitless projects.... ok, I often do fruitless projects. This is one of them. I tracked my time at work. Then wrote some blog posts peeling back the data onion layers.

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The Data

Measured over 62 working days during which I participated in 335 meetings.

33% of my time is spent in meetings. That's about 2.7hrs/day or 1.5 days/week spent in meetings. In isolation, this metric seems appropriate to me. Well designed and executed meetings are critical for collaboration and communicating ideas. If 30% of my time is spent on these kinds of meetings and the remaining 70% is focused on productive work, then this split seems reasonable.

However, we've already seen that not all of that remaining 70% is focused on planned work.

Tracking Time at Work: Planned vs. Unplanned Work

We’ve all been there. You plop down at your desk, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed 🐿️, coffee steam curling lazily up from your “best dog mom” mug ☕. You know what you need to do today.

Next TopicBailey Belvis

How long are these meetings?

The average meeting length is 31.2mins.

Rounding down just a bit, I think its fair to say most meetings are 30min or less in length. Still, the chart above shows that many meetings end up either running short or long. I personally don't see a practical world where every meeting starts and ends exactly on time, but I do think this metric is worth monitoring.

I'm glad to see that most meetings are conducted within 30min. However, while keeping meetings short and focused is absolutely a great practice, it can have the unfortunate side effect of slicing your day up into a bunch of little segments where there are only 15-30min between any given meeting. It's hard to make meaningful progress on a task or a larger project when you only have these slivers of time.

What types of meetings are happening?

Interestingly, I have sync's, standups, and status meetings. Together they make up 46% of my time spent in meetings. On the surface these seem redundant, however, each of these meetings has a slightly different audience and the level of detail communicated is often drastically different.

For instance, standups happen almost daily. The audience is the engineers themselves, and the discussion is fairly detailed about that day's tasks and blockers. I receive action items from these meetings to help remove blockers for folks, set priorities between competing tasks, and get a sense of project status (are we ahead or behind). That being said, I have found that standups are what you make them. If you participate, engage, and communicate, they can be invaluable. If you give a low effort update and then checkout for the rest of the meeting, then they are indeed a waste of time.

Sync's are the next level up. The audience is usually the immediate stakeholder of a project or team. The sync is usually on a weekly cadence and is to help them understand the current state of the active project and to start looking ahead at planning the next project. These tend to be more one-on-one meetings, just me and the stakeholder.

Status this is the highest level of communication. The audience of these meetings is usually Directors and VPs, they boil down to expected delivery date and what's on deck to be worked next. These happen on a weekly basis and are usually involving a large group of folks who are taking turns reporting status up the chain.

When it comes to team ceremonies like standups, grooming, and retro's, 26% of my meeting time is spent on these. That nets out to only 7% of my total time. Considering I attend these for two different teams, and sometimes sit in on other team's ceremonies, I don't think this is bad at all. My observation is these meetings continue to add value and feedback positively into our processes.

Which stakeholders generate the most meetings?

All in all, this looks exactly as I would expect.

The top three contributors here are My Team, My Pod, and My Manager accounting for 46% of my meeting time, which perfectly matches the previous statistic for time spent in standups, syncs, and status meetings.

The next biggest category of stakeholders would be Product Managers together contributing to 13% of my meeting time. This is reasonable considering these are my primary stakeholders. I'm actively working on helping with their roadmap planning and product feature delivery. I need to meet with these people to do those things.

Do more meetings happen when in the office?

Yes and no.

In the office, 53% of my time is spent in meetings vs. only 26% when at home.

But there is an important caveat here...

As we saw in a previous post, I average only 7.85 hours of work/day when in the office vs. 8.52 hours of work/day when at home. So without normalizing for this (and the fact I work from home more days per week than I go to the office), the raw percentage of time spent in meetings will appear inflated on In Office days.

Tracking Time at Work: How much do I work?

Once you start tracking your time, the first and easiest question to answer is: “So how much do you actually work anyway??”.

Next TopicBailey Belvis

Even so, when I'm in the office, I can expect to spend roughly 50% of my time holed up in a meeting room or on a Zoom call, or both.

Do more meetings happen on certain days?

I wanted to include this chart for completeness but admittedly its not all that exciting or revealing.

I spend the most amount of time in meetings on Mondays, and the least amount on Fridays. This tracks with the idea of Monday primarily being a day for getting organized and planning the week.

Conclusion

I think this data is very interesting because its one of the first times on this journey that my perception has vastly differed from reality. If you had asked me, I would have estimated that I spend anywhere from 50-70% of my time in meetings when in reality its only 33%.

So why the big disconnect between perception and reality?

I hypothesize there are two reasons:

1. My estimation is based on the visual representation of my calendar
2. I put in more hours to get my tasks done to make up for spending time in meetings

When I look at any given day on my calendar and see three or four blocked segments of time, at a glance, my brain probably interprets that as about "half the day" even though by the numbers its far less than that. On the flip side, if I have a day completely filled with meetings, I may be forced to put in extra hours before or after the day to get my tasks done, this extra time helps push the overall percentage back down.

This analysis has shown me that while the total time spent in meetings may not be as bad as I perceived there is some low hanging fruit here that could be optimized, specifically when it comes to the heavy overlap between status and sync meetings with stakeholders. Optimizing how progress updates are reported up the chain could decrease my total time in meetings by ~25%.

And the next time I hear myself complaining about how many meetings I'm in, I may have to check myself.

Next post in series:

Tracking Time at Work: Time spent per Task

With all those meetings, all those pesky Slack messages, all those impromptu flyby questions, have you ever wondered how much time you actually get to do uninterrupted, focused work?

Next TopicBailey Belvis