We need to talk about meetings

How meetings sabotage productivity and ways we can combat it

Are you finding it hard to concentrate these days? You sit down to work only to find yourself interrupted by a message on Teams, due in a meeting, distracted by your inbox or a notification on your phone. At the end of the day, despite being busy, you've got nothing done.

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone – and it’s not your fault.

According to Microsoft’s 2025 Workplace Trends report 68% of workers say they don’t have enough uninterrupted focus time and the average employee spends two thirds of their time in meetings, their inbox or chat messages.

Our ability to focus and get things done has not mysteriously disappeared. Constant task switching due to non-stop digital interruptions is eroding concentration.

6 ways task switching impairs concentration

1. Attention residue

Whenever we start something new without completing something else, we create what might be considered an ‘open loop’ in the brain. Thoughts about the earlier activity continue to persist in the mind, even though we're now focusing on something else (Leroy, 2009).

Termed ‘attention residue’, these thoughts interfere with our ability to concentrate on the new task as part of our attention is snagged on something else.

2. Brain drain

The brain runs on oxygen and glucose. Every time we switch task, draws from this limited energy reserve. The more we switch, the faster we use it up. Eventually, we hit a point where clear thinking becomes difficult, if not impossible.

Once that mental energy is depleted, no amount of coffee will bring it back. 

What your brain really needs is a proper break that allows it to rest and refuel.

3. Crushed creativity

New ideas about a subject or solutions to a problem generally come when we take a break from thinking. Whenever we allow the mind to wander, we give the brain the chance to consolidate disparate ideas and come up with novel ones. The infamous 'aha! moment'.

Switching tasks when we feel fidgety (checking your inbox or scrolling on social media) or stopping work to attend a meeting, prevents any form of creative break from happening.

4. Lost time

Time between tasks can add up, especially as we tend to get ourselves sidetracked by something else on our way back to the original piece of work. Some studies have found it can take as long as 23 minutes to return to the original task (Mark et al., 2008).

On top of this, when we do eventually get back to the interrupted task, we have to remember what we were doing and what we thought about it, before we can get going again.

5. Mental overwhelm

Repeated task-switching can provoke a state of ongoing distraction, worry and overwhelm. This raises blood pressure and levels of stress hormones making it harder to concentrate.

Constant meetings or other interruptions can also have the knock-on effect of feeling like you have to work at pace or work longer to get the task done. Over time, this can cause us to disengage or need time off due to stress/burnout.

6. Quality issues

Frequent task-switching is known to negatively impact working memory which hinders our ability to think well and produce error-free work.

This means when you do finally get back to work, rather than thinking deeply about what you’re working on, you end up spending your time (and mental energy) correcting things.

Meetings: the biggest culprit

By far the greatest thief of focus time is meetings. Since 2020, when COVID19 made online meetings the norm, the number of meetings has tripled.

Once only used for strategic planning, meetings are now a default form of communication; even five minute chats have become calendar invites.

The average employee spends about 11 hours a week in meetings – almost a third of the working week. Half of us attend 3 or more meetings every day.

Meetings are becoming the greatest thief of focus time

The maker-manager mismatch

A major reason meetings steal our capacity to get work done comes down to when they happen.

More than half of all meetings occur when many of us are at our most productive - between 09:00-11:00hrs and 13:00-15:00hrs (Microsoft, 2025).

This problem stems from the lack of recognition that managers and makers work in fundamentally different ways (Graham, 2009).

Managers troubleshoot issues and check on progress by having meetings. Work diaries and meeting apps are designed for this, offering hour-long appointment slots by default. As meetings are how they fulfil their role, the rhythm of back-to-back meetings suits them.

Makers – researchers, report writers, programmers, designers, engineers – do not organise their work this way. Technical work requires deep thinking. To solve problems, create or design things, Makers need long, uninterrupted blocks of time.  

Nothing meaningful can be achieved in random hours sprinkled across a week.

When Makers stop to attend a meeting, not only is the time lost that could be spent on task but momentum and cognitive clarity too. Makers tell me they're also less likely to start anything, if a meeting breaks up what could have been a productive morning or afternoon.

This maker-manager difference leads to tension between oversight and output.

Makers can begin to resent the constant interruptions and the need to work longer, feeling that their needs are not important. Managers may not realise that their check-ins unintentionally sabotage delivery.

Unfortunately unless an organisation recognises that makers work best when left alone to focus, the managers’ way becomes the norm with meetings dropped in calendars at any time of day.

How to reclaim focus

If you're feeling constantly interrupted and unable to get meaningful work done, the answer usually isn't better time management or resilience.

What helps is reducing fragmentation - both in how individuals work and in how organisations design the working day/week.

At a high level, reclaiming focus tends to involve two things:

Personal working practices

This is about supporting your brain to do the kind of thinking your role requires. For many people that means:

• grouping similar tasks together to reduce switching

• protecting time for focused work when energy is highest

• creating routines that help the mind settle into work

• using breaks to genuinely restore attention, rather than adding more stimulation

Different strategies work for different people depending on role, workload and constraints - and they only work when the surrounding culture allows them to.

Team and organisational shifts

Individual effort can only go so far if the environment is constantly distracting.

Focus and productivity improve most when teams:

• are clearer about when meetings are needed - and when they aren't

• set shared expectations around response times.

• make better use of asynchronous communication.

• are enabled to protect focus time.

Without this, people are left trying to concentrate despite how work is organised.

Bottom line

Your ability to concentrate hasn’t disappeared - it is being compromised by modern work practices. Meetings, especially badly timed ones, are often the biggest issue.

Reclaiming focus isn't about doing more when you're already stretched. It's about designing work in a way that supports how the brain actually functions.

When we do that, productivity tends to improve naturally - without longer hours or greater effort.

Take care of you.

If meetings are eroding focus and draining energy, the issue isn't resilience - it's how work is designed. This is the space I work in - helping individuals and organisations who want to establish better ways of working.

You'll find more reflections on sustainable working, focus and productivity elsewhere on the blog. And if you’d like to stay connected, you can subscribe to Mental Wealth Tips for my monthly insights and invitations to my free Worklife Wellness webinars.

References and further reading

Graham, P. (2009). Maker's schedule, manager's schedule. PaulGraham.com. https://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

Hari, J. (2022). Stolen focus: Why you can't pay attention—and how to think deeply again. Crown

Leroy, S. (2009). Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2), 168–181.

Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008). The cost of interrupted work: More speed and stress. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 107–110.

Microsoft (2025). 2025 Annual Work Trend Index. Microsoft. https://news.microsoft.com/annual-work-trend-index-2025/

Rock, D. (2020). Your brain at work: Strategies for overcoming distraction, regaining focus, and working smarter all day long (Rev. ed.). HarperCollins.

Uncapher, M.R., & Wagner, A.D. (2018) Minds and brains of media multitaskers: Current findings and future directions, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 115(40), 9889–9896.