<story><title>Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?</title><text>Hi HN - curious to understand how much time engineering leaders spend in meetings.  Thinking engineering managers, directors and VP&amp;#x27;s...&lt;p&gt;Extra credit:  What&amp;#x27;s the longest duration meeting you regularly have?  (For OP, it&amp;#x27;s a twice monthly 4 hour meeting with ALL product and engineering sr. mgrs and directors - FML)</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>nirvanis</author><text>I have around 18 hours per week of prebooked meeting time (1:1s, team meetings, planning, 1:1 with manager, sync meetings with different cross initiatives, interviews, candidate screening, etc).&lt;p&gt;I have observed that my biggest productivity killer are not those meetings (I try to make them useful for me and I try to make sure they are useful for everyone). The biggest problem comes when the time around them is very fragmented. For me, a week with 30 hours of meetings can be more productive than a week with 15 hours if I manage to defragment the time around them.&lt;p&gt;I have recently worked with my team and other peers to put an effort to defragment my calendar by batching predictable meetings together (this is a process I repeat every 6-12 months) and I feel an immediate boost in focus.&lt;p&gt;My rule of thumb is trying to make sure I get daily focus slots as close as possible to length X where X is:&lt;p&gt;X = ( (40 hours) - (prebooked hours in meetings) &amp;#x2F; (5 weekdays) )&lt;p&gt;In my case (40-18)&amp;#x2F;5 = 4.4 hours. I currently have two 4-hour slots monday and tuesday, a 5 hour slot on wednesday and a 3 hour slot on thursdays. Not bad. But that degrades quickly!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>forkexec</author><text>Another technique is to insist on an agenda before any meeting, both for time to prepare and to see if it&amp;#x27;s pertinent, or the default answer is &amp;quot;no.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Standing meetings are 99% a waste of time, usually about someone&amp;#x2F;s trying to climb the career stripper pole.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Meeting overload – how many do you have daily/weekly?</title><text>Hi HN - curious to understand how much time engineering leaders spend in meetings.  Thinking engineering managers, directors and VP&amp;#x27;s...&lt;p&gt;Extra credit:  What&amp;#x27;s the longest duration meeting you regularly have?  (For OP, it&amp;#x27;s a twice monthly 4 hour meeting with ALL product and engineering sr. mgrs and directors - FML)</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>nirvanis</author><text>I have around 18 hours per week of prebooked meeting time (1:1s, team meetings, planning, 1:1 with manager, sync meetings with different cross initiatives, interviews, candidate screening, etc).&lt;p&gt;I have observed that my biggest productivity killer are not those meetings (I try to make them useful for me and I try to make sure they are useful for everyone). The biggest problem comes when the time around them is very fragmented. For me, a week with 30 hours of meetings can be more productive than a week with 15 hours if I manage to defragment the time around them.&lt;p&gt;I have recently worked with my team and other peers to put an effort to defragment my calendar by batching predictable meetings together (this is a process I repeat every 6-12 months) and I feel an immediate boost in focus.&lt;p&gt;My rule of thumb is trying to make sure I get daily focus slots as close as possible to length X where X is:&lt;p&gt;X = ( (40 hours) - (prebooked hours in meetings) &amp;#x2F; (5 weekdays) )&lt;p&gt;In my case (40-18)&amp;#x2F;5 = 4.4 hours. I currently have two 4-hour slots monday and tuesday, a 5 hour slot on wednesday and a 3 hour slot on thursdays. Not bad. But that degrades quickly!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mason55</author><text>One thing I did to combat this was refuse to allow any recurring meetings on Fridays.  I almost always end up with a couple of one-offs but I can usually put those at the start of the day.  Typically this results in 6+ hours of uninterrupted time on Friday.&lt;p&gt;The rest of my week is a fragmented disaster but at least Fridays are nice.</text></comment>