How much time do I spend in meetings?
The answer
Add up the length of every event in your calendar where at least one other person is invited, over the last three months. Divide by your working hours over the same period. The result is the share of your time spent in meetings.
The calculation in three steps
- Take three months. One week shows an exception. A quarter shows a habit.
- Keep only the meetings: events with at least one other attendee. A slot you block on your own to work is not a meeting.
- Divide by your working hours. With 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. days, a quarter has about 64 working days, or 576 hours.
- Meetings over 90 days
- 115 h
- Working hours (64 days × 9 h)
- 576 h
- Share of time in meetings
- 20%
Example. Replace 115 with your own total.
What the total hides
Two days with three hours of meetings don't feel the same. On the first, the meetings run back to back in the morning and the afternoon stays whole. On the second, they fall at 10 a.m., 1 p.m. and 4 p.m.: no free stretch lasts more than two hours.
To see it in your own week, write down each day your longest stretch with nothing scheduled between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. That number often explains why a day goes by without getting anything done.
Do it in one minute
Counting three months of calendar by hand takes time. TimeSpark's free audit does the calculation for you on your Google Calendar.
What the audit measures, over 90 days
- Your meeting hours and their share of your week
- The share organised by other people
- Your longest free stretch, on average per day
- Back-to-back events less than 30 min apart
- What spills over before 8 a.m., after 7 p.m. or into the weekend
- Your last Saturday with nothing planned
Free, no account. Your calendar is read, never changed. We keep the totals and the names of your five most time-consuming activities, visible only to you. You can delete everything.
The limits of the calculation
- A call logged without attendees doesn't count as a meeting, even if it was one.
- Likewise, a lunch where you invited someone does count.
- The 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. day is a convention. If your hours are different, the percentage changes.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a meeting?
Any event in your calendar with at least one other person invited. That's the rule the audit uses, and the one to follow if you count by hand.
What share of meetings is normal?
There's no reliable benchmark: it depends on the job. The useful reference is your own. Run the calculation again in three months and compare.
Does the audit change my calendar?
No. It reads the last 90 days without changing anything. It keeps the totals and the names of your five most time-consuming activities, visible only to you, and you can delete everything in one click.
Does it work with Outlook?
For now the audit reads Google Calendar only. TimeSpark itself works with Google Calendar and Outlook.