If your team is multi-tasking during meetings, it’s a sign that the meetings, not the team, needs fixing.

Developers spend 8-10 hours a week, on average, in meetings. While some are useful, many are viewed as unproductive and interrupt long periods of focused work. Good meetings are short, well-prepared, and include only the right people. Scattered or unnecessary meetings disrupt deep work and increase fatigue.

🔎 Paper in Focus: Multi-tasking during Remote Meetings

A diary study with 715 developers at Microsoft showed:

  • 42% multi-task regularly.
  • It is more common in long meetings, where participants often can’t stay engaged for the entire duration or aren’t needed for every part.
  • It rarely happens in ad-hoc or 1:1 meetings, which are typically short and focused on a single decision or topic.
  • Multi-tasking occurs more often in the morning, when people first want to catch up on email and chat.
  • Extrinsic factors such as deadlines, distractions, anxiety also drive multi-tasking.

✅ Take Action: Reconsider Meeting Scheduling

The findings suggest:

  • Keep meetings short: even 15 minutes can be enough.
  • Invite only people who contribute decisions or information (e.g., the “two-pizza rule” at Amazon).
  • Avoid early-morning meetings so people can catch up beforehand.
  • Skip meetings that “could have been an email,” such as simple status updates.

✅ Take Action: Perform a Meeting Audit

Review the past two weeks of meetings and assess:

  • Contribution: Did I meaningfully contribute?
  • Necessity: Could I have skipped it, joined later or left earlier?
  • Efficiency: Could the meeting have been shorter or async?
  • Format: Was it the right type of meeting for the goal?

Then decide which meetings to stop attending, attend only as needed, reduce in frequency, or convert to asynchronous communication.

If you want our Meeting Audit Playbook, contact us and we’ll send it to you.

🤯 Scattered Meetings limit Focused Work

When meetings are spread throughout the day, developers struggle to get into deep work. This leads many to avoid meetings whenever possible: