Developers and Meetings: How to Protect Your Focus Time

It’s Wednesday. You open your calendar: standup at 9:00, sprint planning at 10:30, a “quick sync” at 2:00, and a roadmap review at 4:00. Your actual uninterrupted coding time? Maybe two fragmented hours – if nothing else gets scheduled.

This isn’t a calendar problem. It’s a productivity crisis. Many teams feel meetings are expanding and eating into focus time. This guide explores why meetings can feel especially costly for developers, and provides strategies for reclaiming focus time.

Why Meetings Often Feel Worse for Developers

In 2009, Paul Graham wrote “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” (Graham, 2009). He argues that people who make things operate on a different schedule than people who manage things.

Graham argues that managers can be productive in hour-long blocks, while makers – programmers, writers, designers – need long stretches of uninterrupted time. In that framing, a meeting isn’t just the hour it occupies; it fragments the day into pieces too small for meaningful work.

The Real Cost of a 30-Minute Meeting

When you add a 30-minute meeting to a developer’s calendar, the actual cost is rarely 30 minutes. Here’s an illustrative estimate you can adjust for your context:

Exact numbers vary by role and workload, but short meetings often have long tails.

A Microsoft WorkLab study of back-to-back virtual meetings found increased stress and reduced engagement, with short breaks helping participants reset (Microsoft, 2021).

Attention Residue Compounds the Problem

Sophie Leroy’s research on “attention residue” explains why recovery takes time (Leroy, 2009). When you switch tasks, part of your attention remains stuck on the previous task, and performance on the new task can suffer.

For complex work, this residue can feel particularly costly. See our context switching cost analysis for the full research.

Related work on interruptions found higher stress, frustration, and time pressure when people are interrupted (Mark et al., 2008).

The Meeting Audit: Know Your Enemy

Before changing anything, understand how bad the problem actually is. Run a one-week audit:

Step 1: Track Everything

Log every meeting, including duration, type, and whether it required your active participation. Note meetings where you contributed nothing, learned nothing, and could have gotten the information async.

Step 2: Categorize by Value

Sort meetings into three categories:

• Essential: Decisions that required real-time discussion, complex negotiations, sensitive conversations
• Informational: Status updates, FYIs, announcements – could be async
• Unclear: “Why was I invited?” or “What did we decide?”

Step 3: Calculate the Numbers

What percentage of your week is meetings? What percentage of those meetings were essential? This gives you a baseline for what could potentially shift to async communication.

Common Findings

Common things to watch for:

• Standing meetings that lost their purpose months ago
• Meetings with 12 people where 4 talk and 8 spectate
• “Quick syncs” that could be a Slack message
• Recurring meetings that no one remembers scheduling

The Async Alternative: What Can Replace Meetings

Not every meeting needs to exist. Many serve functions that async communication handles better.

Async communication can create a written record, allow for considered responses, and respect timezone differences. For more on building async-first workflows, see our async-first career guide.

When Async Fails

Async isn’t always better. It struggles with:

• High-conflict discussions: Tone gets misread; real-time helps
• Rapid iteration: Some brainstorming needs the energy of conversation
• Relationship building: Teams need some synchronous connection
• Urgent decisions: If you need an answer in the next hour, meet

The goal isn’t zero meetings. It’s intentional meetings – choosing sync when it’s genuinely the best tool.

When Meetings Actually Make Sense

Some meetings create value that async can’t replicate:

Complex negotiations: When multiple stakeholders have conflicting needs and you need to find a solution together.

Sensitive conversations: Giving difficult feedback, discussing performance, resolving conflict – these require the nuance of real-time interaction.

True emergencies: Production is down. The incident happened. Get the right people together now.

Team bonding: Intentional social time builds trust that makes async collaboration work better. The problem is accidental socializing disguised as work meetings.

Kickoffs and retrospectives: Starting or concluding significant projects benefits from synchronous alignment.

The 2-pizza rule: If a meeting has more than 8-10 people, reconsider. Larger groups can slow decisions and dilute ownership, so split into smaller decision-focused meetings where possible.

Meeting Hygiene: Making Necessary Meetings Better

Some meetings must exist. Make them less painful:

1. Consider Defaulting to 25/50 Minutes

Replace 30-minute meetings with 25 minutes. Replace 60-minute meetings with 50 minutes. The built-in buffer gives people time to recover and mentally prepare for what’s next.

Google Calendar has a “speedy meetings” setting that shortens meetings by 5 or 10 minutes, depending on the length.

2. Require Agendas

No agenda, no meeting. If someone can’t articulate what the meeting is for, it probably shouldn’t happen. The agenda should answer: What are we deciding? What information do attendees need beforehand?

3. Start with the Decision

Open with: “The decision we’re making today is X.” This prevents the meeting from wandering. If there’s no decision to make, maybe it should be async.

4. Assign a Decision-Maker

Every meeting should have one person empowered to make the final call. This prevents “let’s circle back” loops that spawn more meetings.

5. End with Action Items

The last two minutes should capture: What did we decide? Who is doing what? By when? If a meeting ends without clear next steps, it probably didn’t accomplish anything.

6. Record for Absent Members

If the information matters, record it. This allows people to skip meetings they don’t need to attend in real-time, catching up async instead.

Calendar Defense Strategies

Protecting focus time requires proactive calendar management.

Block Focus Time First

Before your calendar fills with other people’s priorities, block time for your own work. Treat focus blocks like meetings – they’re non-negotiable commitments.

Some people block 9:00-12:00 daily. Others protect entire days. Experiment to find what works for your role.

Maker Mornings

A common pattern: no meetings before noon. Mornings are often when focus is highest; protect them for deep work. Batch meetings into afternoons.

Meeting-Free Days

Some teams designate specific days (often Tuesday and Thursday) as meeting-free. The predictability helps everyone plan deep work.

Batch Meetings

Instead of scattering meetings across the week, cluster them. All meetings on Monday and Friday afternoons. Tuesday-Thursday for focus. This creates long uninterrupted stretches.

Say No (With Scripts)

Declining meetings feels uncomfortable. Having scripts helps:

• “I’m not sure I’m the right person for this – could [colleague] attend instead?”
• “I’m protecting focus time this week. Could you share notes after, and I’ll follow up async?”
• “What decision are we making? If it’s informational, I’d prefer to catch up via the recording.”
• “My calendar is at capacity this week. Can we handle this async, or reschedule to next week?”

You may find people are relieved to have fewer people in the meeting.

For Engineering Managers: Leading by Example

Managers set the tone for meeting culture. A few principles:

Audit your team’s meeting load. If your developers are in meetings for large chunks of the week, they’re not coding during those hours. Is that what you intend?

Cancel ruthlessly. Recurring meetings often outlive their usefulness. Every quarter, review recurring meetings and ask: is this still necessary?

Protect your team’s focus time. When someone wants to schedule a meeting with your developer, ask if it’s necessary. Be a shield, not a passthrough.

Model async communication. If you send urgent Slack messages at all hours, your team can feel obligated to be always available. If you write thoughtful async updates, they’ll follow.

Make focus time visible. Share that you’re blocking focus time. Celebrate when the team ships during uninterrupted stretches.

Measuring Success

How do you know if changes are working?

Track Focus Time

Before and after implementing changes, measure hours of uninterrupted focus time. If you already track time (for example, with Super Productivity), you can review how much time went to deep work versus reactive tasks.

Monitor Meeting Load

Track percentage of week in meetings over time. Is it trending down?

Subjective Experience

Ask the team: Do you feel like you have time to do your actual work? This qualitative signal matters alongside the numbers.

Output Metrics

More focus time often leads to more output – features shipped, bugs fixed, code reviewed. If you’re protecting focus but output isn’t improving, something else may be getting in the way.

The Organizational Challenge

Individual strategies help, but meeting overload is often a systemic problem. Some organizations have cultures that equate presence with contribution and visibility with value. In those environments, declining meetings carries career risk.

If that’s your situation, the advice above still helps at the margins. But lasting change may require:

• Finding allies who share the concern
• Proposing team experiments with data
• Advocating for policy changes (meeting-free days, async defaults)
• Choosing companies that value focus

Developer time is expensive; wasting it in unnecessary meetings is expensive too.

Conclusion: Every Meeting Is a Choice

Meetings aren’t inherently bad. Poorly managed meetings are bad. Meetings that should be async are bad. Meetings that fragment maker schedules without delivering value are bad.

Every meeting on your calendar got there somehow. Someone decided it was worth the cost. The question is whether that decision was conscious or habitual, whether the value delivered justifies the focus time destroyed.

Protect your time. Default to async. When you do meet, make it count.

For more on reclaiming focus, see our Anti-Context Switching Guide and Deep Work Guide. If you’re working remotely, our Async-First Career Guide explores how to build sustainable distributed work habits.

References

• Graham, P. (2009). Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule. paulgraham.com.
• 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. CHI ‘08 Proceedings, 107-110.
• Microsoft. (2021). Research Proves Your Brain Needs Breaks. Microsoft WorkLab.