Too many meetings and overflowing calendars are zapping productivity—employees need protected focus time to work smarter, not just busier !

💡 No matter your role, everyone needs uninterrupted focus time to deliver their best work.

☝️ Yet, the reality is stark—employees are getting 46% less deep work time than they need to be most productive.

⏰ The average employee needs 19.6 hours of focus time per week but gets only 10.6 hours—less than half of what’s required for peak performance.

👔 👗 The C-suite spends, on average, 10.2 hours per week working overtime. This is 35.3% more overtime than the average employee and adds up to over 50 hours per week.

🏆 Executives also attend the greatest number of meetings per week, at 11.5, compared with someone in a non-managerial role attending 8.2.

📈 Meeting overload is a major culprit—employees are attending 29.6% more meetings than they’d like, leading to 6.6 hours of overtime weekly and an average of 4.7 cancelled or rescheduled meetings each week.

🚩 “Defending enough focus time” and “keeping multiple calendars in sync” are consistently the two top challenges employees face across all levels, closely followed by “keeping schedule flexible for priority changes”

💡 Fragmented schedules—with short gaps between meetings—prevent workers from getting into a true flow state, making it harder to drive meaningful results, according to a new interesting research published by Reclaim.ai using data 📊 from over 10,000 Microsoft Office users, revealed some alarming findings about how busy employees are at work.

✅ Employees Losing Nearly Half of Their Deep Work Time

Despite working overtime, employees are spending more time on busy work and less on deep, focused tasks. Research shows that workers are accessing 46% less focus time than they actually need to be productive.

For leaders, the challenge is even greater—disruptions, meetings, and admin tasks are cutting into their ability to strategize, innovate, and drive meaningful results.

✅ Employees attend 29.6% more meetings than they want to

Researchers revealed that employees ideally want to attend 8.2 meetings a week to be most productive in their jobs. That’s only 1.64 meetings a day, freeing up the rest of their time to focus on productive heads-down work.

But in reality, the average employee attends 10.6 meetings a week – 29.6% more than they ideally should every week. 

✅Employees average 4.7 canceled or rescheduled meetings per week

Meetings are in constant flux—new ones pop up, others shift, and some disappear altogether. The bigger the attendee list, the more scheduling conflicts arise, making rescheduling inevitable.

Managing time effectively isn’t just about setting meetings—it’s about juggling scheduling, rescheduling, cancellations, focus time protection, and syncing multiple calendars to keep workflows running smoothly.

✅ Managing calendars takes time

Researchers found that the average person spends 4.2 hours/week managing their calendars:

➡️ 15.5% of people spend less than 1 hour/week managing their calendars

➡️ 63.1% of people spend 1-5 hours/week managing their calendars

➡️ 17.1% of people spend 5-10 hours/week managing their calendars

➡️ 2.7% of people spend 10-20 hours/week managing their calendars

➡️ 0.7% of people spend 20-30 hours/week managing their calendars

➡️ 0.9% of people spend over 30 hours/week managing their calendars

There are actually more people who spend 5-10 hours/week managing their calendars than people who spend less than 1 hour/week. And 1.6% of people with calendar-heavy roles are spending over half their workweek just managing calendars.

☝️ 𝙈𝙮 𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙫𝙞𝙚𝙬:

I find this research fascinating—it highlights just how crucial focus time is for employee productivity, especially as meetings continue to take up more of the workday. With the rise of AI-powered tools, organizations now have a unique opportunity to enhance efficiency and give employees more time for deep, meaningful work. A new study from Microsoft reveals that employees using Copilot save up to 10 hours over 11 weeks, proving the tangible impact of AI on workplace productivity. Meetings are a top priority for organizations, and Microsoft itself found that the number one productivity disruptor is inefficient meetings. The challenge teams are facing is identifying the 2.4 unproductive meetings a week that should be removed from employees schedules.

Thank you 🙏 Reclaim.ai researchers team for these insightful findings:

Patrick Lightbody

Dave Ulrich George Kemish LLM MCMI MIC MIoL

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