Listen to this post: Why the Five Minutes Between Meetings Never Actually Feel Like a Break
There’s a particular kind of tired that shows up around 3pm on a day stacked with calls, and it isn’t quite the same as being tired from the work itself. You haven’t lifted anything, written much, or solved anything especially hard. You’ve mostly just talked, listened, and nodded at the right moments, one call sliding into the next with maybe ninety seconds in between. By the fourth or fifth meeting, you’re not thinking any slower. You’re just emptier, in a way a to-do list doesn’t really explain.
The instinct is to blame the meetings themselves — too many, too long, the wrong people invited. Sometimes that’s fair. But a lot of the exhaustion people describe after a day like that has less to do with any single meeting and a great deal more to do with what happens, or doesn’t happen, in the gap between them.
Your Brain Doesn’t Actually Leave the Last Meeting When You Do
There’s a useful piece of research out of the University of Washington, from a management professor named Sophie Leroy, on what she calls attention residue. Her finding, roughly: when you move from one unfinished task to another with no real break, a portion of your attention stays stuck on the first one, quietly running in the background while you’re supposed to be fully present for the second. You’re technically in the new meeting. Some fraction of you is still finishing a sentence from the old one.
Meetings are a particularly stubborn source of this, because they rarely end cleanly. A call that was supposed to wrap at 2:00 runs to 2:04, someone drops a decision in the chat as you’re leaving, and you’re dialing into the next one still holding a half-formed thought about the first. None of that is dramatic on its own. It’s the accumulation across five or six calls in a row that turns an ordinary workday into the specific, hollowed-out tired that doesn’t match how much you actually did.
What the Research on Back-to-Back Calls Keeps Finding
This isn’t just a feeling people have talked themselves into. A few years ago, researchers working with Microsoft’s human factors lab ran an experiment using EEG caps on people sitting through a block of virtual meetings — some scheduled back-to-back, some with short breaks in between. The back-to-back group showed a steady climb in beta-wave activity, a pattern associated with stress, that kept building meeting after meeting with nowhere to go. The group that got even a few minutes between calls saw that stress signal reset each time, rather than stacking on top of itself.
The detail that stands out isn’t that breaks help, which is hardly a shocking finding on its own. It’s that the stress wasn’t really coming from any individual meeting being especially hard. It was coming from never getting the chance to come back down before the next one started. A day with six easy meetings and zero gaps can leave you more frayed than a day with three difficult ones that each had room to breathe afterward.
Checking Your Phone Isn’t the Gap It Looks Like
The obvious move in that ninety-second window is to glance at a phone — a message, a headline, whatever’s waiting. It feels like downtime because your hands have stopped typing, but it rarely functions like one. A notification feed is still asking something of you: read this, react to that, decide if it matters. It’s a different kind of effort than a meeting, not an absence of effort, which is part of why four minutes of scrolling between calls can leave you walking into the next one no more reset than when you left the last.
What actually seems to help is smaller and stranger than it sounds: something with a genuine, built-in stopping point, short enough to fit the gap you actually have. A few people keep a tiny, self-contained game around specifically for this — nothing with a leaderboard or a reason to keep going, just something that runs for a minute or two and then simply ends on its own. Starlight Run gets used this way by a few people I know between calls, less because it’s relaxing in any deep sense and more because a round of it is genuinely, unambiguously over by the time the next meeting starts — which a phone, left to its own devices, almost never is.
None of this requires turning the gap into some separate, zen moment. The point isn’t the specific activity, it’s the shape of it: something that occupies just enough attention to crowd out the half-finished thought from the last call, then hands you back before the next one begins, rather than quietly extending itself the way a feed tends to. A ninety-second gap filled that way does more for 4pm than the same ninety seconds spent half-reading something that was never going to resolve anyway.
None of this will make a six-meeting day feel like a light one — it wasn’t, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help. But a day where each gap actually closes before the next call opens tends to end in a noticeably different place than one where every gap just adds itself to a running total that never gets to reset. The meetings were always going to be tiring. There’s no real reason the gaps between them have to be.
