Meetality

How to play

Enter how many hours a week you spend in meetings and how long you've been working. It returns the total in days, weeks, and where relevant, months of your life.

Playing it well

There isn't one — this is a number, not a game. But the figure to pay attention to isn't the total, it's the annual rate, because that's the one you can still change. A total is a fact about the past; a rate is a decision you're currently making every week.

Ways to play it

The rate version ignores the lifetime total and reports only hours per week, which is the number you can still do something about. The team version totals a whole team's meeting load, and produces a figure that is usually met with silence. The counterfactual version converts the total into something concrete — a language learned, a qualification finished — which is either motivating or the single most demoralizing output on the site, depending entirely on the week you are having.

What people get wrong

Treating the total as a measurement rather than an order of magnitude. The inputs are your own estimate of a typical week, and people underestimate meeting load by a wide margin when asked and overestimate it when annoyed. The second mistake is including meetings you value — a number that lumps a good one-to-one in with a status call you resent tells you nothing useful. The third is showing the total to somebody who enjoys their job.

Meeting etiquette

Best kept to yourself, or shared with someone whose number is similar. Showing your total to someone who loves their job is an act of aggression, and showing it to your manager mid-review is a career choice.

Where it comes from

Estimates of time lost to meetings vary wildly depending on who's selling what — figures between 15% and 50% of the working week circulate freely, most of them from companies that sell meeting software. Take any specific claim, including the one this calculator produces, as an order of magnitude rather than a measurement.

Questions people ask

Where do the underlying figures come from?

Your own inputs, extrapolated. Published estimates of time lost to meetings range from 15% to 50% of the working week, and most of them come from companies selling meeting software.

Does it count meetings I was double-booked for?

It counts whatever you enter. If you were in two meetings at once, you were meaningfully in neither, which is its own finding.

Is the number depressing on purpose?

The number is arithmetic. Whether it is depressing depends entirely on what you have been doing with the other hours.