Meeting Load Calculator
How much of your working week meetings take, what that is over a year, and how much uninterrupted focus time is actually left once the gaps between them are counted.
Multiply meetings per week by their average length for meeting hours, then take them from the working week.
How the meeting load calculator works
Multiply meetings per week by their average length for meeting hours, then take them from the working week. But a 30-minute meeting costs more than 30 minutes: the ten minutes either side are rarely productive, and a day chopped by four meetings has few blocks long enough for deep work. The calculator adds a switching cost per meeting and reports the focus time that survives.
Formula: meeting hours = meetings × minutes ÷ 60; focus = working hours − meeting hours − meetings × switching cost
Worked examples
| Inputs | Share of the week in meetings | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 15 meetings of 45 min in a 38-hour week | 30 % | 30% — 11.25 hours; 23 hours of focus left |
| A manager: 25 meetings of 30 min | 31 % | 31% — 12.5 hours; 21 hours of focus |
| A light week: 5 meetings of 30 min | 7 % | 7% |
FAQFrequently asked questions
What is a healthy share?
Under about 20% for people whose output is individual work — code, writing, analysis — and under 50% for managers. Above that, ask which meetings could be an update by message, shorter, or less frequent.
What is the switching cost?
The time lost winding down before a meeting and getting back into flow after it — research on interruptions puts the return-to-task cost at 10–25 minutes. Fifteen minutes per meeting is a fair default; back-to-back meetings share it.
How do I get focus time back?
Cluster meetings into one or two blocks a day, keep at least one meeting-free day a week, default to 25 or 50 minutes rather than 30 or 60, and decline meetings with no agenda.
Does this include the cost of other people’s time?
No — the meeting cost calculator does that. This one is about your own calendar and how much of it is usable for work that needs a stretch of attention.
Where these figures come from
- ISO 8601 — Date and time — Representations for information interchange — the yyyy-mm-dd format and the week-numbering rules used here
- US Naval Observatory — Calendars — the Gregorian leap-year rule
- GOV.UK — bank holidays — bank holidays by nation (not applied here)
Last checked: September 2026. The Gregorian calendar rules do not change; working-day counts exclude Saturdays and Sundays only.