Productivity

Meeting cost, focus time, email load and scheduling. 9 calculators for working out where the hours actually go. Payroll and staffing numbers sit under Business.

Context switching builds on Gloria Mark’s work at UC Irvine, which timed how long people took to return to an interrupted task: 23 minutes and 15 seconds on average, and the figure has survived several replications since. It is not that people cannot concentrate. The brain has to reload working memory, rebuild the rules of the task, find its place again, and actively push the interruption out of mind. Each step is quick. Together they are most of half an hour.

Meeting cost is far more useful on the annual line than the per-sitting one. Ten people, one hour a week, at an average salary of $80,000 comes to about $385 a meeting, which sounds survivable. Across a year it is $20,000 in salary and roughly $30,000 fully loaded, which is a junior hire’s entire compensation spent on one recurring calendar entry.

The overhead multiplier is a real input, not decoration. Salary alone understates what an hour of anyone’s time costs by a quarter to a half.