The silent productivity killer lurking in plain sight
You start your day with good intentions. There’s a to-do list waiting, a fresh cup of coffee on your desk, and a few hours of deep work carved out. But somewhere between emails, Slack messages, and back-and-forth calendar pings, your day disappears. By the time the afternoon rolls around, you haven’t even started your actual work. And yet, you’ve been busy all day.
One of the most overlooked drains on productivity is hiding in plain sight: scheduling meetings.
Why does scheduling feel so harmless?
It doesn’t seem like a big deal. You check your calendar, send a few messages, maybe suggest a couple of time slots. If the other person is quick, you’re done in minutes. If not, you follow up, offer more options, loop in another participant and suddenly you’ve spent 20 minutes trying to find a slot that works for three people.
Now multiply that by five meetings a week. Or ten. Add in the time your team spends doing the same. That’s not just overhead, it’s a full-blown cost center masquerading as “just part of the job.”
According to Avoma’s research, teams spend up to 2.5 hours every week just managing the logistics of meetings. That’s 10 hours a month, 120 hours a year, per person, lost not to the meetings themselves, but to scheduling them. That time doesn’t show up on any timesheet, but it erodes productivity all the same.
The myth of the five-minute task
In a study shared by Boomerang, researchers found that people consistently underestimate how disruptive scheduling is. It’s considered a low-effort, low-impact task, but its cumulative effect is staggering. It breaks focus. It turns into threads that stretch over days. And worst of all, it hijacks the one thing knowledge workers can’t afford to waste: their attention.
The truth is, scheduling isn’t a five-minute task. It’s a repeated interruption. And it’s happening across your company every single day.
The hidden effects on team productivity
At scale, the cost of scheduling is staggering. When teams coordinate across time zones, departments or clients, the back-and-forth only increases. And while software has made calendars more accessible, it hasn’t solved the core problem: scheduling still requires too much manual coordination.
More importantly, it delays decisions. A project kickoff waits two days because the meeting hasn’t been locked in. A customer touchpoint gets pushed back because no one confirmed the invite. Momentum slows. Not because your team lacks motivation but because their time is being spent arranging when to talk, rather than actually talking.
In a world obsessed with optimizing workflows, why do we still accept scheduling as a necessary inefficiency?
It’s time to question the status quo
If this sounds familiar, you’re the only one. Most teams don’t recognize how much time they lose to this process until they measure it. But once they do, the picture becomes clear. Scheduling is not just a productivity leak, it’s a bottleneck for communication and progress.
The good news? You don’t have to live with it. There are smarter, faster ways to coordinate without playing calendar Tetris.
But before we get to the solution, it starts with noticing the problem.
Take a closer look at your week. Track how often you switch tabs to check calendars, chase replies or nudge someone about a time. What could that time have gone toward instead? What ideas got pushed back? What tasks lost momentum?
Now imagine what would happen if you got even half of that time back.
In the next blogpost, we’ll explore exactly how modern teams are rethinking their meeting workflows and why fixing scheduling might be the simplest way to reclaim your productivity.
