Oddly Measured

How much of my working life have I spent in meetings?

Convert your weekly meeting load into the number of whole working days it represents.

Real maths • Your answers stay on your device

What you'll need

  • How many years you have worked in meeting-heavy roles
  • Meeting hours in a normal week
  • How many weeks a year you work
  • How long your working day is

Why bother working this out

'Hours in meetings' is a number that's easy to estimate for a single week, but it rarely gets carried forward across a whole career. Expressed as working days instead of hours, it becomes something you can compare directly to holidays, notice periods and other quantities of time your job already forces you to think in.

The choice to use working days rather than 24-hour days is deliberate. Turning meeting hours into calendar days invites a much more dramatic-sounding number that doesn't actually mean what it appears to mean — nobody sits in back-to-back meetings for entire days including nights.

Scheduled calls and stand-ups count. Corridor conversations do not.

52 weeks minus leave and public holidays.

Used to turn meeting hours into working days — never into 24-hour days.

Optional extras

Add this and we can work out what share of your working life is meetings.

Only used to show a number. Nothing is stored or sent anywhere.

Your number appears here.

Answer the questions and press Show me my weird number. Everything is worked out on your own device.

Making sense of the number

The figure grows in direct proportion to your weekly meeting load, so it functions as a magnifier on that one number rather than a verdict on meetings in general. In the worked example above, 10 hours a week over 10 years came to 115 equivalent working weeks; twenty hours a week over the same decade would double that to 230 weeks, purely because the formula is linear in meeting hours.

More on this in how to read an estimate without mistaking it for a measurement.

How we work this out

We multiply your weekly meeting hours by the weeks you actually work and the years you have done it, then convert those hours into your own working days. The result is deliberately expressed in working days rather than 24-hour days, because nobody attends meetings in their sleep.

Step by step

  1. Work out total meeting hours: years × working weeks per year × meeting hours per week.
  2. Divide by the length of your working day to get equivalent working days.
  3. Divide by five to get equivalent working weeks.
  4. If you supply your total weekly hours, divide meeting hours by total career hours for a percentage.

Worked example

Say:10 years in meeting-heavy work, 10 meeting hours a week, 46 working weeks a year, an 8-hour working day. Meeting hours total 10 × 46 × 10 = 4,600. Divide by an 8-hour working day for 575 equivalent working days, then by five for 115 equivalent working weeks — a little over two years of five-day weeks.

What this does not claim

  • Working days are your working days, not 24-hour days. A 240-working-day result is not eight months of continuous meetings.
  • One representative week is applied across your whole career. Most careers have quiet years and years that are entirely calendar.
  • The hourly value figure is a way of picturing time. It is not a claim about what your employer gained or lost.

For how figures like these get chosen in general, seehow a lifetime estimate is actually builtand how we choose assumptions and sources.

Sources

This calculator uses no external reference values. Every number comes from your own answers, plus standard calendar and unit arithmetic — a mean year of 365.2425 days, and twelve months in a year.