Meetings have been growing for decades, and despite the post-pandemic push toward async work, most knowledge workers still spend a significant portion of their week in scheduled conversations. Here are the numbers that define the current state of meetings in the workplace.
How Much Time Workers Spend in Meetings
The average knowledge worker attends 11-15 meetings per week, spending roughly 12-15 hours — about a third of their working time — in scheduled meetings. This has increased steadily over the past several decades, with research suggesting the time executives spend in meetings has roughly tripled since the 1960s.
Managers and senior leaders spend significantly more. Middle managers typically report 35-50% of their week in meetings, while C-suite executives can spend 60-70% of their time in scheduled discussions, leaving limited blocks for deep work and strategic thinking.
Meeting Duration and Frequency Trends
The shift to remote and hybrid work changed meeting patterns in interesting ways. Meetings got shorter on average — research from Microsoft and others found that the average meeting duration dropped from around 60 minutes to closer to 30-45 minutes. But the number of meetings increased, offsetting the shorter duration. Workers now attend more meetings per day than they did pre-2020, with many reporting 4-6 meetings daily.
The most common meeting length is 30 minutes, followed by 60 minutes. Meetings under 15 minutes remain relatively rare despite evidence suggesting they're more effective for most purposes. The cultural default of 30-minute calendar blocks drives behavior — people schedule 30 minutes because that's what the calendar tool suggests, not because the topic requires it.
The Productivity Impact
Research consistently shows that excessive meetings are one of the top complaints among knowledge workers. Surveys from various workplace research firms find that 65-70% of employees say meetings prevent them from completing their actual work, and a similar percentage report attending meetings they consider unnecessary.
The cost isn't just time in the room. Studies on context switching suggest that fragmented schedules — days broken up by scattered meetings — reduce productive output by 20-40% compared to days with consolidated meeting blocks or no meetings at all. A day with four 30-minute meetings spread across the schedule often yields less productive output than a day with two hours of back-to-back meetings and six hours of uninterrupted focus.
Meeting Overload by Industry
Technology companies tend to have the highest meeting loads, driven by agile ceremonies (standups, sprint planning, retrospectives), cross-functional collaboration, and the ease of scheduling video calls. Engineers in particular report frustration with meeting volume interfering with coding time.
Financial services and consulting also skew high, with client meetings, internal reviews, and compliance discussions filling schedules. Healthcare and manufacturing tend to have fewer scheduled meetings for operational staff, though administrative roles in these sectors face similar volumes to other industries.
What the Data Tells Us
The pattern is clear: organizations default to meetings as the primary coordination mechanism, even when alternatives exist. The companies seeing the best results are those that treat meeting time as a scarce resource — tracking it, budgeting it, and actively reducing it where possible.
Start by measuring your own numbers. Use our meeting cost calculator to quantify what your meeting schedule costs, then compare it to these benchmarks. If you're above 30% of working hours in meetings, there's almost certainly room to cut without losing collaboration quality.