Total hours of Brexit negotiations? [closed]

Question

Brexit negotiations are important, as there is much to lose on both sides. But I am wondering:

How many hours were spent since the referendum on negotiation talks?

Is it possible to estimate? I could not find any news articles mentioning it, and it is also not on Wikipedia, and I also couldn't find, for example, a report listing all the meetings of Michel Barnier with durations.

Answer 1

I found all the negotiation meeting agendas by the UK and EU (1, 2). From there, the meeting dates are listed in the table below.

These are 115 days.

Most meetings are weeks with a half-day (2.5h) each in the beginning and end, and 2-3 days of full-day (7h) meetings in between (example), often with 4-9 parallel sessions. Taking a very rough average here of ((6 parallel sessions) * (7h) * (2 days) + (2.5h * 2 days)) / (4 days) gives 22.25 hours of talks per day. I chose 2 days here, because there are also some single day meetings and telecons, some half-day, some full-day, so it accounts for these more or less. The number is high because of the parallel talks.

Multiplying the two together, gives a total of 2559 hours.

Missing are inofficial meetings, talks on summits, phone calls, etc.. Naturally there are caveats in the above calculation.

Table of meetings:

Year	Month	Day
2017	6	19
	7	17
		18
		19
		20
	8	28
		29
		30
		31
	9	25
		26
		27
		28
	10	9
		10
		11
		12
	11	9
		10
2018	1	16
		17
		29
	2	6
		7
		8
		9
		19
		20
		26
		27
	3	5
		6
		7
		13
		14
		15
		16
		17
		18
		19
	4	16
		17
		18
	5	22
		23
		24
	6	5
		6
		7
		8
		19
		20
	7	16
		17
		18
		19
		24
		25
		26
	8	16
		17
		21
		22
		29
		30
		31
	9	5
		6
2019	2	7
	3	11
	4	10
2020	3	2
		3
		4
		5
		30
	4	15
		20
		21
		22
		23
		24
	5	11
		12
		13
		14
		15
	6	2
		3
		4
		5
		12
		29
		30
	7	1
		2
		3
		20
		21
		22
		23
	8	18
		19
		20
		21
	9	8
		9
		10
		28
		29
		30
	10	1
		2
		9
		19