When coordination owns the middle of the day, employees quietly subsidize the system with mornings, nights, and weekends

For years, I thought my most productive hours started after everyone else stopped working.

As a product and engineering leader, the middle of the day belonged to meetings, questions, decisions, reviews, and the constant work of keeping teams aligned. The evening was different. Slack slowed down. The calendar stopped moving. I could finally write, think through a difficult problem, or work on the strategy I had been carrying in my head all day.

It felt productive. Sometimes it even felt good. What took me longer to recognize was how strange the arrangement had become.

The work requiring the most judgment, creativity, and concentration was happening outside the hours officially reserved for work. The workday itself had become a place for talking about the work.

The work that requires the most judgment is often pushed into the hours when the fewest people can interrupt it.

While building Earmark, we heard versions of this across more than 100 conversations with product managers and product leaders. People wanted more time with customers, more room to think, and more capacity to shape the product. Instead, the center of their day was consumed by internal coordination. The work they considered most important survived by moving to the edges.

That is more than a scheduling problem. It is an operating model that quietly depends on personal time to make the numbers work.

The center of the day belongs to responsiveness

Look at a meeting-heavy calendar and the problem seems obvious: there are too few open hours. But even the open hours are often fragmented by messages, approvals, follow-ups, and unscheduled requests.

The result is not simply less time. It is a division between two kinds of work. The center of the day is optimized for responsiveness: attend, answer, clarify, review, unblock. The edges are where people attempt work requiring continuity: strategy, writing, analysis, design, and careful decision-making.

Workplace analytics from ActivTrak’s 2025 State of the Workplace reflect that tension. Its data showed focus efficiency falling from 65% to 62% and the average focused session shrinking 8%, while collaboration time increased 27% and multitasking increased 5%.

Collaboration is not inherently the enemy of focus. Product development is collaborative by nature. But when collaboration expands without removing any of the work it interrupts or creates, focused work does not disappear. It gets displaced.

The calendar may still show eight or nine hours. What changes is where the unfinished work goes.

A full calendar does not eliminate the work. It reschedules it into someone’s life.

Organizations benefit from borrowed productivity

When people consistently finish important work at night, the organization still receives the output. The requirements are written. The strategy gets finished. The executive update appears before the next morning. The sprint keeps moving.

From the company’s perspective, the system can look functional. The visible work gets done, deadlines are met, and collaboration remains high. The cost is absorbed privately by the employee whose workday had no room for the work.

This is borrowed productivity. The organization borrows time from mornings, evenings, and weekends without recording it as part of the workflow that made those hours necessary.

The borrowing can begin before anyone sends an actual message. Research from Virginia Tech, published in the Journal of Management, studied organizational expectations that employees monitor work communications during nonwork hours. Across three studies, the researchers found that the expectation itself created anxiety and negatively affected employee health, relationship conflict, and even the wellbeing of employees’ partners. The problem was not only answering email. It was knowing work might require attention at any moment. The study is available through Virginia Tech’s research repository.

That distinction matters. An employee does not have to be actively working for work to occupy the evening. Anticipating the message, remembering the unfinished artifact, or knowing tomorrow begins with an undocumented decision can keep part of their attention attached to work.

A company can appear productive because employees are donating the edges of their lives.

Flexibility and displacement are not the same thing

There is an important nuance here. Not everyone who works at night is being exploited by a broken system. Flexible work gives people legitimate reasons to move work around: school pickup, caregiving, appointments, exercise, or simply a personal preference for quiet evening hours.

The question is whether the person chose the evening or whether the day left nowhere else for the work to go.

Flexibility means having meaningful control over when work happens. Displacement means spending the day responding to the organization and using personal time to complete the responsibilities against which you are actually evaluated.

The two can look identical in activity data. Both might show a document edited at 9 p.m. But they feel entirely different to the person doing the work.

Gallup’s workplace research reinforces the importance of that experience. Its analysis identifies unmanageable workload, unclear communication, inadequate manager support, and unreasonable time pressure among the factors most strongly associated with burnout. Gallup also finds that how employees experience their workload can matter more than the raw number of hours.

The problem is not simply that work occurs after 5 p.m. It is the loss of control that occurs when meaningful work can only happen after 5 p.m.

Flexible work should mean choosing when to work - not searching for any remaining hour in which work is possible.

Protecting focus cannot be an individual contest

Most advice for reclaiming the center of the day is directed at individuals. Block the calendar. Decline the meeting. Turn off notifications. Set office hours. These practices can help, but they turn focus into a contest between one employee’s boundaries and everyone else’s ability to place demands on their time.

The employee usually loses because the demand is organizational while the defense is personal.

Research on meeting-free days shows what changes when the organization participates. In a study published by MIT Sloan Management Review, researchers examined 76 large companies that had introduced between one and five meeting-free days per week. The research found that even one meeting-free day improved reported autonomy, communication, engagement, satisfaction, and productivity while reducing stress. When meetings were reduced by 40%—the equivalent of two meeting-free days—reported productivity increased by 71%. The paper is also indexed by the University of Reading’s research repository.

The specific percentages should not be treated as a universal promise for every company. But the direction is instructive: when organizations protect time collectively, people do not stop communicating. They gain more control over when and how communication happens.

The lesson is larger than no-meeting days. Focus cannot depend entirely on whether each employee is skilled or senior enough to defend their calendar. The work system itself has to stop treating every open space as available coordination capacity.

The work after the conversation is what gets displaced

Our discovery at Earmark helped us understand which work was moving to the edges. It was often not the meeting itself. It was everything the meeting left unfinished.

Someone had to turn the conversation into a decision log. Someone had to write the requirements, create the tickets, update the stakeholders, preserve the rationale, and follow up with the people who were not there. That work was important enough to complete but rarely important enough to receive its own protected time.

The meeting occupied the scheduled hour. Its consequences occupied whatever hours remained.

This is why simply shortening meetings or generating better summaries does not fully solve the problem. A concise summary can make the aftermath easier to understand, but it still leaves someone responsible for turning that understanding into execution.

Our bar for Earmark became more demanding: the conversation should produce the work while the context is still alive. Decisions, requirements, follow-ups, and updates should be ready to review before they become another evening task.

If collaboration creates work, the workflow should account for that work before the meeting ends.

Give the center of the day back to meaningful work

Meetings will remain important. Product teams need conversation to debate tradeoffs, learn from customers, resolve ambiguity, and make decisions together. The goal is not to protect individual work from collaboration at all costs.

The goal is to stop making people choose between collaboration and completion.

That is what compels us to build Earmark. We have lived the day where the calendar is full and the work remains untouched. We have watched product teams accept nights and mornings as the only dependable place to think. And we believe AI gives us an opportunity to remove the administrative aftermath of collaboration rather than merely helping people squeeze it into less visible hours.

An organization should not need employees to donate the edges of their lives in order for its operating model to function. The center of the workday should contain more than meetings about what matters.

It should contain the work that matters, too.

The workday is not working if the real work has to wait until it is over.

Sources

• ActivTrak Productivity Lab, “2025 State of the Workplace”, 2025.

• William J. Becker, Liuba Y. Belkin, Samantha A. Conroy, and Sarah Tuskey, “Killing Me Softly: Organizational E-mail Monitoring Expectations’ Impact on Employee and Significant Other Well-Being”, Journal of Management, 2019.

• Benjamin Laker, Vijay Pereira, Pawan Budhwar, and Ashish Malik, “The Surprising Impact of Meeting-Free Days”, MIT Sloan Management Review, 2022. Also indexed by the University of Reading.

• Gallup, “How to Prevent Employee Burnout”.