Meeting overload: how to get your focus time back

The calendar is full, but the focus time has gone. It’s the classic side effect of hybrid work, and it’s rarely the meetings themselves that are the problem.

When work became flexible, the meeting became our default answer to almost everything. Need to coordinate? Book a meeting. Need a quick decision? Book a meeting. The result is a calendar of wall-to-wall meetings, and focus time squeezed out to the edges of the day. And the price is high. Gloria Mark, who researches information and attention at the University of California, has described how it takes on average 23 minutes to get back into focus after an interruption. So every unnecessary meeting doesn’t just cost the half hour it takes up in the calendar. It also costs the time it takes to get your concentration back afterwards.

The problem isn’t the meetings, it’s the habits

Most meeting problems are a matter of habit, not of tools. We meet because we always have, and because seeing each other feels safer than writing to each other. But every meeting we book without thinking costs someone else their focus time.

The numbers confirm the gut feeling. In Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, 68% of 31,000 respondents said they don’t have enough uninterrupted focus time during the working day. When the calendar is shared and focus time isn’t, everyone ends up losing.

How to spot meeting overload

Meeting overload creeps in, and most teams only notice once the damage is done. The clearest signs are easy to see once you start looking for them:

• The calendar is wall-to-wall meetings. There are no gaps to think, prepare or catch your breath between meetings.
• The real work has moved to the edges of the day. Focus tasks only get done early in the morning or after dinner.
• The meetings have no clear owner or purpose. Nobody quite knows why they’ve been invited, but everyone accepts just in case.
• People multitask their way through meetings. With the camera off, the meeting becomes background noise while they try to get something else done.

If you recognise three out of four, there’s nothing wrong with you. The problem is the system, and the fix is an agreement between you.

Three steps that work

The good news is that meeting overload rarely calls for a big reorganisation. Three concrete steps fix most of it.

1. Make 25 and 50 minutes the standard

Short meetings finish on time and leave breathing space in between. Set it as the default in your calendar, so you don’t have to decide every time. The extra five or ten minutes aren’t wasted. They’re the break your brain needs before the next meeting. The usual objection is that you can’t get everything done in 25 minutes. It’s usually the other way round: a tight frame creates focus, and meetings that used to spill over into a whole hour get sharper when time is short.

2. Introduce shared meeting-free blocks

Two mornings a week without meetings protect focus time for everyone at once, and it’s easier to stick to when the whole team does it. Individual focus time falls apart the moment one important invitation lands on top of it. Shared blocks hold because nobody has to stand up for them alone. Worried it’ll make you unavailable? The opposite usually happens. When everyone knows which mornings are off limits, it gets easier to plan the things that really do need you all together.

3. No agenda, no meeting

A meeting without a clear purpose is a conversation that could have been a message. Make the agenda the price of entry. It sounds rigid, but it’s one of the kindest rules you can give each other, because it makes the person sending the invitation think: is this worth a meeting, or can it be handled asynchronously?

“A meeting without an agenda is a conversation with a calendar invitation.”

It starts with leadership

Meeting culture is set from the top. When leaders cancel the unnecessary meeting themselves, protect their own focus time and decline the meetings they don’t need to be in, it gives the rest of the team permission to do the same. Fewer, better meetings aren’t a calendar exercise, they’re a leadership decision.

I’ve tried it myself. In my time as a hybrid leader at Microsoft, we reached a point where the team agreed: there were simply too many internal meetings a week, and a large share of them were booked by people outside the team. So they made an agreement. Internal meetings, whoever booked them, could only be on Mondays and Fridays, unless something quite exceptional needed them to meet. The rest of the week they kept clear for what actually moved sales. They were a customer-facing team, so it was easy to get support for more time with customers.

What they didn’t talk about back then was the breaks between meetings, the time for focus tasks and the time to recharge. I wish I’d known more about that at the time. Because clearing the calendar isn’t enough. There also has to be breathing space in the time you clear, or something else will just fill it up again.

Start small: pick one of the three steps and run it for a month. That’s often enough to feel the difference and get focus time back in the calendar. If you want to work more systematically with rhythms and focus time, it’s one of the 5 pillars of hybrid leadership, and we cover it in our talk on wellbeing and digital working habits.