Distance Did Not Steal Your Focus

Start with the number everyone agrees on. After lockdowns began, a study of more than three million users across sixteen metropolitan areas found meetings per person up about 13 percent, attendees per meeting up about 14 percent, and the average workday longer by roughly 48 minutes. Microsoft, looking at its own telemetry, reported weekly meetings up 153 percent and weekly meeting time up 252 percent over two years, along with a third activity peak appearing late in the evening for about 30 percent of people.

The office camp reads that and says, correctly, that something broke. The remote camp reads it and says, also correctly, that a 48 minute commute did not come back either. Both of them then stop reading, which is a shame, because the interesting part is what those meetings are made of.

They are made of coordination. Specifically, they are made of coordination that used to be free.

The hallway had no calendar, which is why it was never in the budget

In an office, a large amount of coordination happens in units too small to schedule. A glance at a whiteboard. A question asked over a shoulder. A correction delivered in four seconds by somebody who overheard a wrong assumption on the way to get coffee. None of it was designed, none of it appeared on anyone's calendar, and none of it consumed a thirty minute block from eight people at once.

Take the room away and that coordination does not stop being necessary. It gets reissued in the only currency a distributed organization has, which is a meeting invitation. A four second correction becomes a fifteen minute call. An overheard assumption becomes a standing sync to make sure we are all on the same page. Meetings under fifteen minutes became the majority of all meetings, which is exactly what you would expect if a lot of very small interactions had just been given calendar entries.

The meeting explosion is not a remote work problem. It is the invoice for coordination your organization was receiving for free and never priced.

And here is the part that should stop anyone from blaming the laptop. This was already happening. Research across two decades found that time spent in collaborative activities had grown by 50 percent or more, with many people spending around 80 percent of their time in meetings or answering colleagues' requests. That was published in January 2016, when the office was full and the argument had not started yet.

What an interruption actually costs, which is not what you think

The intuitive story about interruptions is that they make work take longer. The controlled experiment says something stranger. Mark, Gudith and Klocke interrupted people mid-task and measured what happened. The interrupted tasks were completed in less time, with no measurable drop in quality. People compensated by working faster.

The compensation was not free. Interrupted participants reported higher stress, higher frustration, more time pressure and more effort. Nothing you could see on the deliverable, everything you could see on the person.

Leroy added the other half. When you switch from one task to another, part of your attention stays behind on the first one, and the second task begins with a degraded version of you working on it. She called it attention residue. It means a day made of eleven twenty minute fragments is not the same as a day with three hours of work in it, even when the arithmetic says it is.

Put those two findings next to the most quoted anti-remote statistic and the picture resolves. Gibbs, Mengel and Siemroth tracked more than ten thousand IT professionals and reported time in coordination and meetings rising while uninterrupted work hours shrank considerably. Total hours worked rose by about 30 percent. Average output did not significantly change.

That is the interruption literature, reproduced at the scale of a firm. People compensated. It cost them.

The famine is collective, and that is the good news

Leslie Perlow spent nine months inside a software engineering team that felt permanently short of time. What she found was not laziness or bad prioritization. The group's own way of working with each other produced the shortage: engineers constantly interrupted each other, a crisis mentality made every interruption feel urgent, and a reward system built around individual heroics quietly paid people for being interruptible.

She changed how the group used time, and collective productivity went up.

That study is from 1999. Everybody was in the office. Nobody had a laptop worth taking home. The time famine was not caused by distance, because there was not any, and it was solved by design rather than by adjacency.

If your team had focused time in 2019, somebody built it. If it did not, the building was not going to start now.

What this means for the argument you are actually having

Return to office is often proposed as an attention fix. The reasoning is that people are distracted at home and will focus in the office, and there is a version of that which is true. Atkin, Schoar and Shinde randomly assigned data entry workers to home or office and the home group was 18 percent less productive, so the home environment is not a neutral variable and pretending otherwise is not honest.

But notice what a mandate does and does not touch. It changes where the fragmentation happens. It does not remove a single recurring invitation, it does not reduce the number of people who can reach you, and it hands back the hallway coordination while keeping every calendar entry that replaced it. Several organizations have now run this experiment and discovered that they have both.

Meanwhile the trial that found no performance loss at all, Bloom, Han and Liang's randomized study of 1,612 people at Trip.com, ran in a company with an established operating rhythm. Two days a week at home, performance grades unchanged across the next two years of reviews, quit rates down by a third. Same technology. Same year. Different conditions.

Three things worth doing this week

None of these requires a policy, a platform or a decision about real estate.

• Count the blocks, not the gaps. Take one person who does making work and count last week's uninterrupted blocks of ninety minutes or more. No meeting, no expected reply, no queue. If the answer is zero, you have found something a location policy cannot reach.
• Audit what the recurring meetings replaced. Most standing syncs were created to solve a specific coordination failure. Name the failure for each one. The ones where nobody can remember are not coordination, they are sediment.
• Make protection a group decision, not an individual one. Perlow's result did not come from teaching engineers to focus harder. It came from changing what the group did to each other. One person blocking their calendar in an organization that rewards instant response is not protecting time, they are accruing a debt.

Whatever number you get for the first one is the real answer to the attention question. It was probably the same number in 2019, and the office was covering for it.