Why meeting load doubled after 2020 — and what hasn't walked it back.

If you want one reliable dataset on how meeting load has changed since 2020, it’s Microsoft’s. Their Work Trend Index runs on anonymised Teams telemetry — the largest available behavioural dataset on meetings — and they’ve published an annual edition every year since 2022. What follows is what each edition actually said, plus what the peer-reviewed research adds.

The 252% number, in its own words

The canonical stat comes from Microsoft’s March 2022 WTI Pulse Report, “Great Expectations: Making Hybrid Work Work.” The exact wording: “Since February 2020, the average Teams user saw a 252% increase in their weekly meeting time and the number of weekly meetings has increased 153%.”

That is weekly minutes, not weekly meetings — two different numbers in the same sentence, often conflated. Minutes rose faster than count, which means the average meeting also got longer.

What the 2023 edition added

The 2023 WTI (“Will AI Fix Work?”) shifted focus to AI but kept publishing meeting metrics. The notable addition: distribution. “The top 25% of people spend 8.8 hours per week in email; the top 25% of meeting-goers spend 7.5 hours per week in meetings.” The load is not evenly distributed — a minority of meeting-heavy roles carries it.

2024 and 2025: volume plateaus, doesn’t fall

The 2024 WTI (“AI at Work Is Here. Now Comes the Hard Part”) and 2025 WTI (“The Year the Frontier Firm Is Born”) don’t repeat the 2022 headline stat. What they do confirm — repeatedly — is that the post-2020 baseline is where meeting volume has settled. Nobody’s charting a reversal.

Microsoft has an incentive to tell this story: they’re selling Copilot as the remedy. But the data itself comes from Teams telemetry, and the 2022 number worked against their product (too many meetings in your product is not a great marketing line). Treat it as self-interested but reliable.

The Stanford work on why video is heavier

The peer-reviewed piece I keep coming back to is Jeremy Bailenson’s 2021 paper in the APA’s Technology, Mind, and Behavior. It identifies four distinct cognitive causes of what became known as “Zoom fatigue”: excessive close-up eye contact, cognitive load of watching yourself, reduced mobility, and the load of decoding non-verbal cues through a low-bandwidth channel.

The point isn’t that video meetings are bad. It’s that an hour of video is more cognitively expensive than an hour of in-person, which means a 23-hour-a-week video calendar (roughly the 2023 top-quartile figure) costs more in energy than the equivalent in-person schedule did.

What to actually do with this

The story the data tells is not “wait it out.” It’s “intentional cuts, now.” The load won’t regulate itself. Teams that didn’t run a calendar audit in 2022 still have the 2022 calendar — just with the cognitive tax of three more years of video meetings added on top.

If you haven’t audited in the last year, the recurring-meeting auditis a weekend’s worth of work and usually pays back a quarter’s worth of time.