We have more technology to save time than ever before. Yet our calendars are fuller, our attention is more fragmented, and the work that could change our future is often the first thing we postpone.
In January 2023, thousands of Shopify employees returned from their holiday break to discover that large numbers of meetings had disappeared from their calendars.
The Canadian technology company had decided to remove recurring meetings involving three or more people, discourage unnecessary gatherings, and protect Wednesdays from meetings. It was an unusually bold experiment for an organization whose employees depended on collaboration across teams and locations.
Shopify estimated that the initiative could save approximately 322,000 hours of meeting time annually. That works out to more than 36 years.
Imagine that for a moment. An organization had become so accustomed to scheduling meetings that removing a portion of them could potentially recover decades of working time in a single year.
The company later introduced a meeting-cost calculator to make the financial impact of meetings more visible. The idea was simple: when six employees spend an hour in a room, the organization has invested six hours of working time, not one. Whether the meeting is worthwhile depends on what those six hours accomplish.
Shopify's experiment raises a question that applies far beyond technology companies.
How much of our working day is spent making meaningful progress, and how much is consumed by activities that simply make us feel occupied?
This question matters because busyness has become an accepted feature of professional life. Full calendars can signal importance, quick replies suggest commitment, and long working hours are sometimes mistaken for ambition.
Yet none of these things tells us whether we are solving the right problems, developing useful capabilities, strengthening relationships, or making decisions that will matter in five years.
We may be working harder than ever while paying less attention to where our work is taking us.
The Calendar Has Quietly Become Our Boss
A study by Harvard Business School researchers Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria offers an unusually detailed view of this problem.
The researchers examined how 27 chief executives spent their time over 13 weeks, analyzing nearly 60,000 hours of activity. The CEOs worked an average of 62.5 hours per week, with meetings occupying approximately 72% of their working time.
More than a third of their time was spent responding to events rather than following their planned agendas.
These were experienced executives with considerable authority, supported by teams and assistants. Yet even they struggled to protect their time from competing demands.
For a middle manager, small-business owner, or professional with limited control over their schedule, the challenge can be even greater.
Consider a manager whose working day begins at eight o'clock. Before the first hour is over, several emails need responses, a colleague has requested assistance, and an unexpected customer issue requires attention. The manager then moves through meetings, operational updates, and more messages.
By late afternoon, the urgent matters have largely been addressed. Unfortunately, the proposal, strategic review, or important decision that was supposed to be the day's priority remains unfinished.
The manager may stay late to complete it, postpone it until tomorrow, or take it home.
Nothing about this situation is unusual. That is precisely the problem.
When every day follows the same pattern, the work that requires our best thinking gradually gets pushed into the least productive parts of our schedule.
And because we remain busy, we may not recognize what is happening.
Technology Made Communication Easier. It Also Made Interruption Effortless.
Modern workplace technology has delivered enormous benefits. We can collaborate across countries, exchange information instantly, work remotely, and complete tasks that once required substantial administrative effort.
But there is an unintended consequence.
When communication becomes easier, people communicate more.
Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index examined aggregated activity across Microsoft 365 and reported that the most heavily interrupted 20% of users received meeting invitations, emails, or chat messages at an average rate equivalent to one interruption every two minutes during an eight-hour working day.
That is a measure of incoming activity, not proof that people stopped working every two minutes. Nevertheless, it illustrates the intensity of digital communication in some workplaces.
An employee can now be available to colleagues, customers, suppliers, and managers throughout the day, sometimes across multiple time zones.
The difficulty is that being available is not the same as being effective.
Researchers have been studying this problem for years. In 2009, Sophie Leroy published research on what she called attention residue. Her experiments found that when people switch away from unfinished work, part of their attention can remain occupied with the previous task, affecting performance on the next one.
Think about what happens when you are preparing an important business proposal.
You spend twenty minutes understanding the numbers, identifying the client's requirements, and beginning to develop your argument. Then a message arrives.
You answer the question, check another notification, and briefly look at your calendar.
When you return to the proposal, you need to remember where you were going, reconstruct your reasoning, and recover your concentration.
The interruption itself may have taken only a few minutes. Its effect on your thinking can last longer.
Multiply that experience across a working day and we begin to understand why professionals can feel mentally exhausted without having made much progress on demanding work.
The solution cannot simply be to ask everyone to concentrate harder. Organizations also need to examine the expectations they create around availability, response times, meetings, and communication.
A workplace that expects instant responses to everything makes sustained attention unnecessarily difficult.
The Real Cost Is Often the Future We Keep Postponing
There is a deeper problem with constantly responding to immediate demands.
The activities most likely to improve our future rarely arrive with an urgent deadline.
Learning a new skill does not usually require action by five o'clock this afternoon. Developing a professional relationship may not produce a commercial opportunity for months. Understanding an emerging technology can seem less important than resolving today's customer complaint.
But consider an executive running a successful manufacturing business.
The company has established customers, reliable suppliers, and years of industry experience. Most days are consumed by operational decisions, budgets, staffing, production schedules, and customer requirements.
Meanwhile, competitors are exploring robotics, AI-assisted quality inspection, new manufacturing methods, and different business models.
The executive intends to investigate these developments. There is an industry exhibition coming up, several research reports worth reading, and a technology company that might make a useful partner.
Yet the executive is always busy. Each week brings more urgent responsibilities, and the research, conversations, and industry event are repeatedly postponed.
A year later, competitors may have moved further ahead, suppliers may have introduced new capabilities, and customers may be asking for services the company is not prepared to deliver.
The problem was not necessarily a lack of intelligence, ambition, or experience.
It was a failure to make time for understanding what was changing.
The same pattern appears in individual careers. Someone may spend years performing their current role well without developing the knowledge or relationships needed for the next opportunity.
They become increasingly efficient at doing the work they already know, while the market begins placing greater value on something else.
This is why time management is so closely connected to the future of work.
Our careers and businesses are shaped partly by what we do every day, but also by what we consistently choose not to do.
Why Better Productivity Tools Are Only Part of the Answer
It is tempting to solve time-management problems by introducing another tool.
We now have software for scheduling meetings, organizing tasks, summarizing emails, recording conversations, and automating administrative work. AI assistants can help draft documents, analyze information, and complete certain routine processes.
These technologies can be valuable.
But efficiency becomes less useful when we use the time saved to take on more unnecessary activity.
If AI reduces the time required to prepare a weekly report from two hours to twenty minutes, that creates an opportunity. The organization could use the recovered time for better analysis, customer relationships, innovation, or employee development.
Alternatively, it could simply ask for five additional reports.
The technology is the same. The outcome depends on the choices made around it.
This is where leadership becomes important.
Managers influence which activities are rewarded, how meetings are conducted, how quickly employees are expected to respond, and whether people have the freedom to concentrate.
An organization that measures commitment through visible activity may unintentionally encourage busyness. One that values clear decisions, useful results, sound judgment, and thoughtful preparation has a better chance of making productive use of its people's time.
Shopify's calendar experiment was interesting because it questioned a widespread working habit at an organizational level. It was an attempt to give employees more control over the time needed to create useful work.
The broader principle is relevant even to businesses that would never consider canceling thousands of meetings.
Sometimes improving performance requires removing activities rather than adding new ones.
The Time We Invest in People and New Ideas
There is one form of professional time investment that deserves particular attention: developing relationships and learning from people outside our daily working environment.
Most of us operate within relatively familiar circles. We speak with the same colleagues, customers, suppliers, and professional contacts. Over time, these relationships provide useful experience and stability.
They can also limit what we see.
A construction executive may not know how quickly opportunities are developing in data center infrastructure. An electrical engineer may have limited exposure to the emerging requirements of AI computing. A logistics professional may not realize how robotics and autonomous systems are changing warehouse operations.
The knowledge exists, but it is often distributed across industries.
This is one of the reasons attending carefully selected industry events can be a valuable professional investment.
A conference brings together people dealing with related problems from different perspectives. An exhibition allows visitors to see equipment and technology operating rather than merely reading about it. A conversation with a supplier, researcher, or executive may reveal an industry challenge that could become a business opportunity.
Of course, attending an event is not automatically worthwhile.
Someone can spend three days walking through an exhibition, listening to presentations, and collecting business cards without gaining much practical value.
The difference lies in preparation and intention.
An executive attending a manufacturing exhibition might decide to investigate three automation technologies and meet two potential partners. A young engineer might identify a specialist field, attend relevant presentations, and speak with professionals already working in it.
A business owner may use a trade conference to understand how customers are changing their purchasing decisions.
These activities require time. But unlike many routine commitments, they can create value long after the event is over.
A useful professional relationship may lead to a new customer, partnership, mentor, employer, or opportunity that would otherwise have remained invisible.
The challenge is making room for those possibilities before they become urgent necessities.
Ten Steps to Put This Into Practice
Understanding how time gets consumed is useful. Changing the way we use it is what makes the understanding worthwhile.
Here are ten practical actions to experiment with over the next seven days. You do not need to implement them all immediately. Start with the changes most relevant to your circumstances, then build on what works.
Examine your last working week. Spend fifteen minutes reviewing your calendar and major activities. Identify where your time went and which commitments contributed to meaningful results. Pay attention to recurring activities that have become routine without a clear purpose.
Choose three important outcomes for the week ahead. Instead of starting with a long task list, identify three results that would make the week worthwhile. They might involve completing an important project, resolving a significant business problem, or developing a professional capability.
Protect one uninterrupted working period each day. Reserve 45–90 minutes, where your role allows, for work requiring concentration. Close unnecessary applications, silence nonessential notifications, and let colleagues know when you will be available again.
Question one recurring meeting. Review its purpose, participants, length, and decisions. Could it be shorter, less frequent, or replaced by a written update? If you do not control the meeting, suggest one practical improvement to the organizer.
Establish a realistic communication routine. Where your responsibilities permit, check routine messages at planned intervals rather than continuously. Agree with colleagues on a separate method for genuinely urgent matters.
Give important unfinished work a clear next step. Before switching tasks, write down where you stopped and what needs to happen next. This can make returning to complex work easier and reduce the mental effort of reconstructing your thinking.
Schedule one hour for professional learning. Explore a development that may affect your industry. Read a substantive report, attend a relevant webinar, or investigate a technology being adopted by competitors or customers. Record one implication for your work.
Strengthen one meaningful professional relationship. Contact a former colleague, mentor, customer, industry expert, or potential collaborator. Ask a thoughtful question or share something useful. Focus on building genuine understanding rather than immediately seeking a favor.
Identify one industry event worth attending. Choose a conference, exhibition, summit, or professional forum connected to a challenge or opportunity you want to understand. Identify what you would learn, who you would like to meet, and what would make attendance worthwhile.
Review the results after seven days. Ask what helped you concentrate, what created unnecessary pressure, and whether you made progress on your three priorities. Keep the practices that worked, adjust the others, and remember to protect time for rest, health, and personal relationships.
The value of this exercise is not in completing ten additional tasks. It is in learning to spend time more deliberately.
Even one sustained change can make a difference if it helps you reclaim attention for work and relationships that matter.
The Bigger Picture
There will always be more things to do than hours available.
Technology will continue making it easier to communicate, coordinate projects, and complete routine work. Artificial intelligence may remove some administrative burdens while introducing new responsibilities and opportunities.
But no technology can make the fundamental choices for us.
We still need to decide which work deserves attention, which relationships are worth developing, which skills we should learn, and how much of our time should be reserved for the people and experiences that make life meaningful.
For executives, those decisions influence the future of their organizations. For professionals, they shape careers and opportunities. For everyone, they affect health, relationships, and quality of life.
A full calendar may tell us that we are in demand. It cannot tell us whether we are moving in the direction we want to go.
That requires a different measure of success.
At the end of the next working week, try asking yourself two questions: What genuinely moved forward, and what did I make time for that will matter a year from now?
The answers may reveal more about your progress than the number of meetings you attended or emails you answered.
And perhaps the most valuable time-management habit begins there: learning to recognize the difference between a day that was full and a day that was well spent.
Industry Events | IE Insights
The Future of Work & the Power of Connections — Season 1, Episode 1
Discover industry conferences, professional forums, exhibitions, and opportunities to connect with decision-makers at industryevents.com.
Research and Further Reading
Michael E. Porter and Nitin Nohria, How CEOs Manage Time, Harvard Business Review, 2018.
Microsoft, Breaking Down the Infinite Workday, Work Trend Index Special Report, 2025.
Sophie Leroy, 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, 2009.
Shopify, This Is What Happened When We Canceled All Meetings, Fast Company, 2023.