The short answer
Too many is the point where meetings stop people doing the work the meetings are about. For most individual contributors that point comes well before it does for managers, because their work needs long uninterrupted stretches and a manager's often does not.
So rather than a number, the useful question is: does each person still get enough unbroken time to do their own job? The research below is about that question, and the checks at the end are how to answer it for your team.
What the research says
Most people spend hours a week in scheduled meetings
In a 2007 review of meeting research, Steven Rogelberg and colleagues put the average employee at about six hours a week in scheduled meetings, with managers spending far more.
That figure predates the move to video calls. Microsoft's 2023 Work Trend Index, based on Microsoft 365 data, found that people were in three times as many Teams meetings and calls each week as in February 2020, and that the quarter of people who use meetings most spend 7.5 hours a week in them.
Managers say meetings get in the way of their own work
Leslie Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley and Eunice Eun surveyed 182 senior managers across a range of industries for the Harvard Business Review in 2017:
- 71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient.
- 65% said meetings keep them from completing their own work.
- 64% said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking.
These are the people who call most meetings, saying the meetings are costing them.
Workers name bad meetings as their biggest distraction
The same Microsoft study surveyed 31,000 people in 31 countries. They named inefficient meetings as their number one disruptor of productivity, with too many meetings third. And 68% said they do not have enough uninterrupted focus time in the day.
Cutting meetings has been tried at scale
In a 2022 study for MIT Sloan Management Review, Benjamin Laker and colleagues followed 76 companies, each with more than 1,000 employees, that introduced between one and five meeting-free days a week. They reported that the best results came at companies with three meeting-free days a week.
At the start of 2023 Shopify canceled every recurring meeting with three or more people, and told staff to wait two weeks before adding any back, and to be highly selective about what returned. A month later its chief operating officer told NPR that the company had deleted 322,000 hours of meetings. By that summer its finance chief told Fortune that average meeting time per person was down 14% on the year before.
Why there is no single number
Four hours of meetings a day can be a perfectly good day for one person and a lost day for another.
- Managers' work is often coordination. Much of what a manager produces happens in conversation, so their meetings are, to a degree, their work.
- Makers' work needs long blocks. Engineering, design, writing and analysis need stretches of an hour or more to get anywhere. Two hours of meetings placed at 10:00 and 14:00 can leave a day with no usable block at all.
- The shape matters as much as the total. Three meetings back to back leave more usable time than the same three spread across the day. That is the idea behind the focus time audit, which scores a day by how much of its free time comes in blocks long enough to use.
Four checks for your team
You do not need a benchmark to tell whether your team is over the line. These four checks will tell you.
1. Can everyone find a two-hour block most days? Look at next week's calendars for the people whose work needs focus. If most days have no unbroken two-hour stretch, the problem is not how many meetings there are but where they are.
2. What share of meeting time is recurring? Recurring meetings are booked once and then run without anyone deciding again that they are needed. If they make up most of your team's meeting time, start there: list each one, its attendees and its cost per year, and ask the organizer whether they would book it today.
3. Do meetings end with decisions? If the same topics come back meeting after meeting, the meetings are not resolving them. More meetings will not help. 5 signs your team has too many meetings covers this and the other warning signs in more detail.
4. What does it cost? Price your recurring meetings for a year. A one-hour weekly meeting of eight people on a $100,000 average salary costs $20,000 a year in salary alone. Numbers like that change which meetings people are willing to defend. How much does a meeting cost? shows the arithmetic, the meeting cost calculator works it out for any meeting, and meeting cost by role gives you hourly rates for 19 common jobs if you do not know salaries.
What to do if the answer is "too many"
- Protect focus time first. Pick one or two half-days a week with no internal meetings. It is the change people notice most, and the no-meeting day calculator shows what it frees up.
- Review recurring meetings. Cancel the ones nobody defends, shorten the ones that run short anyway, and cut attendee lists to the people who are needed.
- Write the rules down. Our meeting policy template is a one-page starting point you can copy.
- Measure again in a month. Without numbers, meetings creep back.
Hourari makes the last step automatic. It connects to Google Calendar or Outlook, prices every meeting, and tracks meeting hours and cost over time, so you can see whether the changes held.