[AstroDogCatcher]

I'm a regular employee but at a professional services org - you basically described how I generate my timesheets.

The main difference is that at the end of the day I try to just stop when I have "enough" hours, since I don't get paid for overtime like I would as a contractor.

To the original topic: roughly 40% of my week is wasted on pointless meetings or inter-meeting dead time. The other time is roughly equally split between useful meetings, actual work, and admin or training tasks.

The issue with the pointless meetings is that they are generally a series, where one 10-minute slot out of every four one-hour meetings is genuinely useful - but you don't know in advance when that slot will occur. The other kind of pointless meetings generally involve customers who are unprepared.