How much time am I spending in meetings?

In my weekly template, I typically only reserve time for my teaching and my recurring meetings. However, there are many additional meetings that come up all the time.

Lately, I feel that I don’t have enough buffer on my weekly template to take up all these meetings – they end up crowding out time that I have set aside for preparing class materials or doing research.

So what better than to quantify the reality?

Here are the numbers!

I have 10 hours of recurring meetings and teaching on my weekly template.

Looking at the last six weeks, however, I have an average of 16.5 hours of meetings. The time I spend in meetings and with students ranges between 10h (a week at the beginning of the year when nothing additional had to be scheduled in) to 21 hours (the semester being in full swing and lots of extra things popping up).

With this information, I know that I need to build in at least 6 extra hours of buffer in my schedule for my weekly template – and I will take this into account for my Fall 2023 weekly template.