Sarah Chen used to love Mondays. As a product manager at a mid-size SaaS company in Austin, she’d spend the first hours of her week sketching product roadmaps and talking to customers. Then the pandemic hit, remote work took hold, and something changed that never changed back.
“I looked at my calendar last Tuesday and counted,” Chen told me. “Seventeen meetings. Seventeen. I didn’t write a single line of product spec until 8:45 p.m.”
She’s not an outlier. She’s the average.
Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index, drawing on behavioral data from tens of millions of Microsoft 365 users, found that the average manager now spends roughly 4.1 hours per day in meetings. That’s more than half the standard workday consumed before a single deliverable gets touched.
The number that should alarm every executive: since February 2020, the average Teams user has experienced a 252% increase in weekly meeting time. Not a typo. Two hundred and fifty-two percent.
The Meeting Creep Nobody Voted For
Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for modern work, has been tracking this trend for years. “What we’re seeing is the infinite workday,” Spataro said in a briefing accompanying the latest report. “Meetings expand to fill the space that commutes and hallway conversations used to occupy, and then they keep expanding.”
The data backs him up. Sixty-eight percent of workers say they don’t have enough uninterrupted focus time during the workday. Half of all meetings cluster between 9 and 11 a.m. and 1 and 3 p.m. — precisely the windows when cognitive research shows most people hit their productivity peaks.
In other words, we’ve accidentally scheduled our deepest-thinking hours away.
And it’s not just daytime. After-hours meetings — those starting after 8 p.m. — are up 16% year over year, driven largely by global teams trying to find overlapping windows across time zones.
The Hidden Tax on Focus
The real cost isn’t the meeting itself. It’s what happens around it.
Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Attention Span, has spent two decades studying how people manage their focus at work. Her research shows that after any interruption — including a meeting — it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to the original task.
“A manager with six meetings spread across the day doesn’t lose six hours,” Mark explained. “They lose the entire day. The gaps between meetings aren’t recovery time — they’re dead zones where context switching eats everything.”
Microsoft’s own data mirrors this. The average worker now spends 57% of their time communicating — in meetings, email, and chat — and only 43% creating, in documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. For managers, that ratio skews even further. Some directors log 16 to 19 hours of meetings per week, leaving barely a full workday for actual managerial work like coaching, strategy, and decision-making.
The irony is thick enough to taste. Managers exist to make teams more productive. Instead, their calendars have turned them into professional meeting attendees.
Three Companies That Cut It in Half
Not everyone accepted the new normal.
In January 2023, Shopify’s COO Kaz Nejatian sent a company-wide message that made headlines: every recurring meeting with three or more people was canceled. All of them. He also instituted no-meeting Wednesdays and capped large meetings at a single six-hour window on Thursdays.
The purge eliminated 12,000 events from Shopify’s collective calendar — the equivalent of 36 years of meeting time erased in a single day.
“An engineer told me that for the first time in a very long time, they got to do what they were primarily hired to do: write code all day,” Nejatian said. He received more positive feedback on the meeting purge than on anything else he’d done at the company.
Asana took a different approach. In early 2022, the company ran what it called “meeting doomsday” — employees identified recurring meetings that lacked value and removed all standing meetings with fewer than five attendees for 48 hours. The aftermath was telling. Most 30-minute meetings shrank to 15 minutes. Weekly syncs moved to biweekly or monthly. Some disappeared entirely and nobody missed them.
Then there’s the broader research. A study led by MIT Sloan Management Review surveyed 76 companies that had introduced meeting-free days. The results: firms that implemented two meeting-free days per week reported a 71% jump in self-reported productivity. Not 7%. Seventy-one.
The pattern across all three cases is the same. When you remove meetings by default, people don’t fall apart. They do their jobs.
Why We Can’t Stop
If the evidence is this clear, why do meetings keep multiplying?
Spataro points to what he calls “meeting FOMO.” In a remote or hybrid environment, scheduling a meeting is the easiest way to signal that work is happening. Declining one feels like opting out of the team.
There’s also a structural problem. Most calendar tools default to 30- or 60-minute blocks. The cognitive effort required to schedule a 12-minute check-in is surprisingly high, so people round up. Multiply that rounding error across an organization of thousands, and you get a culture where everyone is perpetually booked and nobody knows why.
And then there’s the motivation problem. When managers spend their days in back-to-back calls, the intrinsic satisfaction of building something — coaching a struggling employee through a tough quarter, crafting a strategy that actually holds together — evaporates. What’s left feels like administrative choreography.
What the Data Actually Suggests
The fix isn’t “fewer meetings” as a blanket rule. It’s treating time like the finite resource it actually is.
Shopify’s Nejatian uses a meeting cost calculator that estimates each 30-minute meeting costs between $700 and $1,600 when you factor in attendees’ salaries and the opportunity cost of lost focus time. Most managers have never seen that math. When they do, the reaction is always the same: stunned silence followed by calendar auditing.
Microsoft’s own research suggests a few concrete moves. Default meetings to 15 or 25 minutes instead of 30 or 60. Designate at least two mornings per week as no-meeting zones. Require every recurring meeting to have an expiration date — if nobody renews it, it dies.
None of this is revolutionary. It’s just discipline applied to a problem everyone can feel but few bother to measure.
Sarah Chen, the Austin product manager, eventually took matters into her own hands. She blocked 9 to 11:30 a.m. every day as “maker time” and set her status to Do Not Disturb. Her skip-level manager pushed back at first. Two months later, her team shipped a feature they’d been stuck on for a quarter.
“Nobody complained about missing the meetings,” she said. “Because nobody could remember what they were for.”
Four hours a day. That’s the number. And the question every manager should be asking is simple: what would you build if you got half of it back?