Back-to-Back Meetings Harm You, Your Effectiveness, and Your Team

Even if you were a bit more efficient with back-to-back meetings, the cost still may be too high

A common approach to scheduling meetings is to schedule them back-to-back rather than spread them throughout the week. More often than not, people are just wanting to power through the meetings, get them done, and get to the real work. Back-to-back meetings seem like an efficient way to do that.

Whether you’re an individual contributor trying to maximize your day or a leader setting the pace for your team, this pattern shows up everywhere.

I get the logic. Really, I do.

But there’s a massive gap between what seems efficient and what actually works for human brains and bodies. Science shows this isn’t just about personal productivity — it’s about how this seemingly innocent scheduling practice contradicts our biology and cascades into team dysfunction and organizational drag.

Let me show you why that “efficiency” is costing far more than you think — both for you and everyone you work with.

1. Your Brain Needs Processing Time Between Meetings

Think about your last string of back-to-back meetings. By the third one, could you even remember what happened in the first? There’s a reason for that.

Every meeting dumps a ton of information into your mental workspace: decisions made, action items captured, emotional dynamics to process, and new problems to solve. It’s like having multiple browser tabs open — eventually, your system starts to slow down.

Your brain needs about 15-20 minutes to process and file away that information before it’s ready for the next round.¹

When you don’t give it that time, things get messy. You start mixing up which conversation happened where and what you’ve said to whom. Your attention splinters. And even though you might not notice it happening, your performance takes a nosedive.

This isn’t just my observation — Microsoft recently did EEG studies showing exactly this pattern.² Stress spikes and attention crashes when people chain meetings together without breaks.

What we often don’t think about is that context shifting is one of the most challenging things we do and it’s not just the cognitive context shift that we need to account for. Every meeting has a different emotional and social context.

Take the common scenario of meeting with one team or teammate who’s struggling and another who’s performing well. Without an intentional reset and recalibration, it’s easy for a leader to carry the vibe of the first meeting into the second and trample the trust and morale of the person or people in the second team.

2. Your Body Will Fight Back Against Meeting Marathons

I often hear people say “I can power through” or “I’ll rest later.” But here’s the thing: your biology doesn’t negotiate with your calendar.

Your body runs on what scientists call ultradian rhythms — natural 90–120 minute cycles of high and low alertness.³ These natural rhythms are why focus and social blocks in my time-blocking methods are 90-120 meetings long.

Let’s put this in meeting terms: after about two hours of focused engagement, your body is screaming for a reset. It needs:

• Physical movement to release tension

• Real nourishment (not just coffee)

• A genuine shift in attention

• Time to process and integrate

This is why I’m adamant about including recovery blocks after a couple of focus or social blocks in your schedule. The recovery block is not a “nice to have” — it’s a biological necessity.

When we ignore these natural cycles by stacking meetings, we’re not just tired; we're actively working against our body's natural performance rhythm. Instead of achieving flow, we end up with:

• Physical exhaustion that shows up in our posture and voice

• Mental fog that makes simple decisions feel impossible

• Emotional irritability that seeps into every interaction

• Decreased empathy and patience right when we need it most

All of these effects spill into our next conversation whether we notice them or not. Even if we’re not aware of it, the people we’re meeting with definitely are.

3. The Performance Death Spiral No One Notices

Now that we understand both the cognitive load and the biological constraints, let’s look at how this plays out across a day of back-to-back meetings.

It’s one of those frogs in the warming pot scenarios. One of the most dangerous things about back-to-back meetings is how the decline in performance happens so gradually that we don't notice it until we're really struggling. We think we’re handling everything fine — until suddenly we’re not.

Here’s what I consistently see happen to my clients who run the meeting marathon: by that third back-to-back meeting, they’re operating at maybe 60% of their usual capacity. But because the decline is gradual, they rarely notice it happening.

Their working memory — that mental scratch pad we use to juggle immediate information — gets completely overloaded. And just like a computer with too many programs running, everything starts to slow down and glitch.

They start struggling with basics they’d normally nail:

• Remembering key points from earlier meetings

• Making clear decisions (or worse, making hasty ones they’ll regret later)

• Connecting important dots between conversations

• Staying present enough to catch subtle but crucial details

• Maintaining their usual strategic perspective

What’s particularly insidious is that this mental fatigue often masquerades as other problems. Leaders tell me they’re “just not as sharp as they used to be” or wonder if they're “losing their edge.” But when we look at their calendar, the real culprit becomes clear: they’re trying to operate a high-performance brain on a schedule that guarantees poor performance.

As with many team problems, it’s a math problem, not a competency problem.

The cost isn’t just personal either. When you’re operating at 60% capacity, you’re making 60% decisions that affect 100% of your team or business. That’s a gap that compounds over time, especially when those decisions involve strategy, personnel, or resource allocation.

But if you’re in a position of authority, your teammates can’t tell you that you’re not up for the meeting, and worse, they’re likely following your way of scheduling meetings because you’re implicitly modeling effectiveness. Which means they’re probably not resourced enough to rumble with you.

This situation is often even more challenging for neurodivergent team members. People with ADHD, autism, or sensory processing differences may experience the negative effects of back-to-back meetings more intensely — from greater difficulty with context switching to more pronounced mental fatigue after social interactions. Without adequate transition time, you might be inadvertently creating significant barriers to their full participation and best thinking.

This is partially how we end up with broken printers, crutch meetings, and burnout contagions in teams. People lose the ability to see what’s going on because they’re just getting through the best they can.

4. Back-to-Back Meetings Create an Admin Pile-Up

And as we’re getting through, we’re creating an admin pile-up. Each meeting generates at least 15–20 minutes of emotional, cognitive, and administrative work before and after the meeting.

For administrative work, consider that meetings often require:

• Capturing action items into your task management system

• Saving notes, whether you create them or AI does

• Relaying information from the meeting to other people who weren’t in the meeting

• Scheduling the next meeting

When there’s no buffer time, that work piles up invisibly and it needs to live somewhere. It either lives in something outside of your brain or it rolls around in your brain until it shakes you loose.

To get it out of your brain requires those 15-20 minutes. If it lives in your brain, the Zeigarnik Effect kicks in. The mind keeps spinning open loops about unfinished tasks, creating background anxiety and cognitive drag even when we’re trying to focus elsewhere.

Too many back-to-back meetings in a row, over too many days, creates an overwhelming backlog that takes a lot of time people don’t have and strains the brain to remember the details of all the meetings that get squished together.

In case you’re wondering about AI’s role in handling the admin pile-up, the current technology requires a person to evaluate and disseminate the information from meetings. We’re better off with AI because we’re at least able to offload notetaking and are capturing information that was lost, at the same time that we’ve created different work that leads to a pileup for someone.

A lot of people set themselves up for failure by scheduling Fridays to catch up on piled-up admin. This is another one of those “good in theory, problematic in practice” scenarios. It’s problematic because it’s scheduling work they probably don’t want to do for a time they are the least resourced to do it.

After about 30-60 minutes, most people want to bail on doing admin work. This is another math problem: if it takes you 15-20 minutes to close out a meeting, that gets you through about 3 meetings. That’s not counting drafting the emails that are more complex and require more deep thought.

If you’re going to batch admin for later in the week, it’s probably better for those emails to be the more complex ones that you can figure out without the impending deadlines and fires of the week. Having a bunch of lower-level admin work to do makes it more likely that the Zeigarnik Effect is going to kick in and incentivize you to close a lot of open loops.

On a Friday afternoon, many people are more likely to choose to close more easy loops than fewer complex and ambiguous loops. Here’s where knowing yourself is important: some people actually get momentum and second winds later in the week.

But even if your second wind and go-time energy is later in the week, having a wall of meeting admin to climb over before you can get to that focused work is probably something you don’t want to do.

Schedule at least 30 minutes between meetings

One of the “strong suggestions” I have for clients is that they schedule at least 30 minutes in between meetings. I say “strong suggestions” because my clients get rebellious about rules, even the ones they create.

Thirty minutes gives your brain enough time to:

• Finish processing the previous meeting (capture notes, decompress)

• Reset your working memory

• Honor your body’s focus-rest rhythms

• Emotionally and mentally prepare for the next conversation

It also creates a built-in system for recovering from overruns, last-minute follow-ups, and unexpected emotional spikes that inevitably happen in real life.

So many of my executive and owner clients have a deep knowing of how much cleanup they end up doing because they were overtaxed by their meeting loads. They said something they regret, agreed to do something that wasn’t there, or didn’t hear something important.

All too often, it’s not the meeting load that’s at fault. They simply didn’t give themselves enough time between meetings and/or jump from meeting, to admin, to meeting and didn’t get a full reset.

Back-to-back meetings hurt focus, performance, memory, creativity, and health.

If you want to lead better, work smarter, and leave your team (and yourself) with more energy and clarity, protect the space between meetings like it’s part of the meeting itself.

Because it is.

We’ve Known This for Decades — Now Let’s Act on It

It’s been scientifically established for over half a century that back-to-back meetings don’t fit with how our brains and bodies work. The research from Kleitman in the 1960s to Microsoft’s EEG studies in 2021 all point to the same conclusion.

I want to move the conversation from “this doesn’t work” to “this is actively harming people, teams, and organizations.”

You can continue to work contrary to science and effectiveness if you choose, but don’t be surprised about the effects. Gravity always wins.

Scheduling buffer time between meetings isn’t just a productivity hack. It’s recognizing and respecting the biological reality of being human. Your brain, your body, your team, and your work will all be better for it.

Try it for a month and see what happens. I bet that, like many of my clients, the only reason you’ll go back to it is if someone makes you do it or you fall into an urgency spiral again.

1. Researchers at the University of Illinois found that these brief mental breaks are crucial. They help prevent vigilance decrements and keep you performing at your best. Their study showed that even short diversions from a task dramatically improve focus over extended periods.

2. Microsoft's Human Factors Lab attached EEG devices to participants' heads to monitor brainwave activity during meetings. Their 2021 Work Trend Index research clearly showed the biological stress response to back-to-back meetings and how even short breaks significantly reduced this stress.

3. Sleep researcher Nathaniel Kleitman first identified these patterns in the 1960s in his book, Sleep and Wakefulness. What's fascinating is how his findings about these natural cycles have been consistently validated by modern research over the decades, showing just how fundamental these rhythms are to human functioning.