How to survive “agile”

Hi,

I recently joined a big government organization in my country (Austria) as a data scientist. I come from a small startup and I am used to organize my work on my own. I am pretty productive if I can actually have consecutive chunks of time to crank out code.

Now I am faced with a scrum master and "agile" project management, which I've never done before and the whole process seems crazily bureaucratic to me. I am not sure if this is only me being inexperienced or if this is an organizational thing because it's a government organization.

The amount of meetings needed for this is insane. The sprints are 3 weeks long and our PM insists on having 10 hours each sprint for standups/refinements/blabla etc.

But we all have other responsibilities and projects too. My colleague told me that he had to reserve one day per week vis a vis our boss for the sprint to get anything done for the project.

This means for him it is 24 hours of work vs. 10 hours of meetings in which we only talk about things we should be doing…. It is worse for me since I am new and haven't gotten any tickets. This all seems really wasteful to me.

Is this normal? Or am I crazy and simpy inexperienced? How do I survive this without getting crazy? I have to deliver other stuff too but I do not have enough time because of all these meetings…

Thanks for your advice