How many meetings do you have per week?

And how has this changed from job to job or role to role for you?

Comments

[Zikitel22]

meetings
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|/ ____ years of career

This is sad reality but it is natural.
The more you rise the ladder the less you code and more you discuss ideas/architecture/how things should work. Over the time you manage more teams that have more people involved which means more time to synchronize and get everybody on board -> more meetings.

[Ben Halpern]

What advice would you give someone who wants to manage their career in a direction that limits meetings — even if it means giving up on title and salary opportunities to some extent?

[Zikitel22]

From the top of my head

• Early stage startups - how many meetings do you need to sync 3-4 people given they are mostly seniors :)
• Being part of "innovation department" - never experienced it myself but from what i heard this is almost no meeting environment
• Lone wolf freelancer/consultant - well you have meetings with clients but i doubt that they happen more than once per week

[Joe Mainwaring]

I was pretty meeting heavy when I was in a lead engineer role, but I still managed to get 4-6 hours daily to focus on code.

Some things I did to help balance meetings with getting things done:

• Require meetings to have agendas, otherwise I would not attend
• negotiate with other stakeholders on timing & frequency
• consider meetings optional if a team member was taking the lead

[Edwin]

• Daily stand-up (15-30m) - useful, quick status updates and discuss urgent issues.
• Weekly architecture discussion (1h) - cross-team discussion of any architecture topic, this is good for standardisation across teams, reach consensus on topics.
• Biweekly sprint review (1-1.5h) - Every team presents work delivered during the sprint, useful to see progress and gives devs a feeling of closure.
• Biweekly feature kickoff(1.5h) - PM presents new features and collects some early technical feedback from the team (helps the team get a feeling of what's coming and understand the bigger picture).
• Biweekly sprint planning (1-2h) - estimate planned work for the coming sprint, assign story points and identify any issues before work is started.
• Biweekly retrospective (1h) - feedback on internal processes, which does help to improve over time.

Finally there are functional/technical refinement meetings (1h each, as many as needed) where a small team prepares user stories, define requirements, raise issues in spec/architecture/etc before it is planned for the next sprint.

Sometimes it feels like a lot, but if we don't have these meetings, then devs would have to figure this stuff out during a sprint and the overall delivery time would be longer. So most of them are useful planning meetings, which can be tedious, but we try to limit to 1h so everyone stays sharp.

[Waylon Walker]

When I was a Mechanical Engineer it was solid meetings, making it hard to get work done. I moved over to software and I now have about 1 meeting per day with a lot of working sessions with my team done on the fly. I end up in a Teams call for a good 80% of my day.

[Shrey Dabhi]

We have a daily standup everyday which lasts for 15 to 30 minutes, and an hour long fun meeting where the entire dev team gets on a video call to talk about non work stuff and play online games. Apart from that if something is really complex and cannot be conveyed through chats / phone calls then and only then we do a meeting. So I would say an average of 7 meetings per week

[Daniel Starner]

3-4 meetings per week.

• planning
• 1:1 with manager
• retro
• flex meeting for discussing projects or department-level stuff

We try to keep content and knowledge transfer asynchronous through documentation to limit the number of meetings needed

[Christian Bewernitz]

I think it's important to define the term more clearly to get good answers.

Is every Teams/Slack/Zoom call with more then one more person a meeting? Even if the context/content is preparing/planning/pairing on a ticket?

When there are team rituals, is the length and frequency working for the goals that the ritual is trying to reach?

And last but not least, are the right people invited? Minimize "mandatory meetings" and if a whole group is invited, make it clear (over and over again) when a "relevant discussion" is only for the people that are interested.
And be brave about giving feedback to organiser(s) or even saying "No" if you think it's not relevant for you.

I think it's good to regularly think about/question those things, in a way that's a hygiene thing.

By the way, providing meeting notes for people that didn't have the chance to join makes it easier to jump on and off, or get involved when it's relevant.

[Bobo Brussels]

Full time worker here. I'm in about one meeting per day. Two "standup" syncs per week, one planning meeting, and a few misc meetings on top of that.

[Pascal Thormeier]

Way too many. I've got several roles and projects in the company I work for and I love working in each and every one of them, but sometimes the amount of meetings is overwhelming. This week will be especially rough with a whopping 21 calendar entries for tech discussions, dailies, sync meetings, tech talks, planning meetings, tactical meetings (we do Holacracy) and a pitch preparation or two. Usually it's around 10-13 meetings per week, though.

[GrahamTheDev]

As I am lucky and control my own diary I have gone from an average of 10 per week to an average of 2 over the last year (including zoom calls!)

I literally just say no to a meeting if it can be done via an email or a quick phone call and ask to see an agenda before attending a meeting (if there isn’t one then I will ask for one before confirming attendance).

It caused a few arguments early on while I enforced this, but now I feel like I have a better relationship with clients as I am now more available for clients queries etc. as I have so much more time.