To understand this late-night-work mania, let us analyze what happens when we do a 1-hour meeting.
1. Let us say the meeting involves 6 participants. So a total of 6 hours are lost.
2. Typically, before a meeting, if there is only a little time left, we tend to do some low value activity (e.g., check emails). So let us say, on average, another 15 minutes are lost.
3. After the meeting, let us say, we take another 10-15 minutes to catch our breath and recover our focus.
So a 1-hour meeting consumes 1.5 hours. And for a 6-participant meeting, it is 9 hours. Effectively, one person’s full day is gone.
Of course, the above assumptions may seem pessimistic but the reality is probably even more scary. When you have 4-5 meetings in a day, people tend to not even take up important tasks because they can’t focus.
So the real damage is not the hours lost (be it 6 or 9 hours) but that people deprioritize high-value work. And that work is done late at night. And then, we wonder why we are all doing late nights.
If you want to improve employee wellness, yoga classes are not enough — give people the space to do things they were hired for.
– Rajan