Don't work longer, fix how work happens
Working longer is rarely the answer. Discover how meetings, emails and fragmented work reduce performance and what leaders can do instead.
Working longer is rarely the answer. Discover how meetings, emails and fragmented work reduce performance and what leaders can do instead.
Let us consider a fictional team working in a large global organisation.
On paper, they are exactly the kind of team any senior leader would want. They are talented, committed and experienced. They care about the organisation’s purpose. They want to deliver. They understand that the business has important goals, increasing pressure and ambitious targets to meet. Yet despite long hours and constant activity, progress on the work that matters most is slower than expected.
The instinctive response might be to ask people to do more. Work longer and harder. Sleep less, Push through. Find another level of commitment. But before leaders ask for longer hours, there is a more important question to ask: Is our culture helping people do their best work, or is it making their best work harder than it needs to be?
Because in this team, effort is not the problem. The real issue is the way work happens. Most days begin with good intentions. People plan to focus on critical priorities, solve complex problems, prepare high-quality work and move the strategy forward. But almost immediately, the day is taken over by new incoming demands. Emails arrive. Chat messages multiply. Meeting invitations fill the calendar. Urgent requests interrupt important work.
By mid-morning, many people are already reacting rather than leading their work. They move between consecutive meetings with little time to think, prepare or follow up properly. In meetings, attention is fragmented. People are present, but mentally divided. While one conversation is happening, they are answering emails, checking messages or trying to resolve another issue in the background.
Very busy. But busyness is not the same as productivity. A large amount of time is spent organising work, talking about work, searching for updates, chasing progress and clarifying ownership.
More energy is spent responding than thinking. More meetings are created to discuss decisions that were not properly made in the first place. More emails are sent because people cannot easily see what is happening, who owns what, what is blocked, or what needs attention.
The problem is not only meeting overload or email overload. It is the lack of a clear system for managing work. Tasks are scattered across inboxes, chat threads, meeting notes, personal notebooks and people’s heads. Some commitments are captured. Others are remembered only by the person who happened to hear them. Work moves forward through reminders, nudges and follow-up meetings rather than through one shared place where priorities, owners, deadlines, status and blockers are visible. This creates unnecessary load.
When work is not visible, overload stays hidden. When progress is not visible, leaders ask for updates. When ownership is not visible, people duplicate effort or assume someone else is handling it. When blockers are not visible, issues surface late. When priorities are not visible, everything starts to feel urgent.
So the organisation creates more communication to compensate for poor visibility.
The team does not need more activity. It needs a better way to manage work. A shared task management system, such as Planner (Kanban board), or another work management tool, could make a significant difference. Not because the tool itself solves the problem, but because it creates a shared view of work. When tasks, owners, priorities, deadlines, dependencies and blockers are visible in one place, the team can make better decisions about what to start, stop, delay, delegate or simplify.
For a senior leader, this is not an administrative detail. It is an execution issue.
The organisation is investing heavily in talented people, but much of their best cognitive capacity is being consumed by avoidable friction. The work that requires judgement, creativity, prioritisation, problem-solving and strategic thinking is pushed to the edges of the day. This matters because knowledge work depends on the brain’s advanced executive functions. These are the capabilities people use to make decisions, solve complex problems, regulate emotions, plan effectively, collaborate well and communicate with clarity. They are powerful, but they are also energy-intensive.
The team’s current way of working burns through this energy at speed.
Every notification, every interruption, every shift from one app to another, every move from a strategic task to a chat message and back again creates a cost. People are not simply switching screens. They are switching context, retrieving information, re-orientating themselves, remembering where they were and rebuilding the mental thread of the work. This is fragmentation load.
It is the cumulative toll of constant task-switching, interruptions and micro-decisions throughout the day. Every context switch costs more than people realise, and those costs compound. Cognitive load builds and this mental drain often appears on none of the dashboards leaders use to understand productivity, yet it may be one of the barriers quietly stalling performance.
In fact, recent research suggests that in many organisations, AI is not reducing work. It is intensifying it. [1]
The numbers are hard to ignore:
The downstream cost: less deep work, poorer decisions, more miscommunication, more mistakes, mounting busywork, rising stress and lost progress on high-impact work.
This is the hidden waste in modern knowledge work. It does not always look like waste from the outside. People are active. They are responding. They are attending. They are sending. They are joining. They are visible.
But inside the workday, attention is being repeatedly broken apart. People start important tasks, then stop. They answer a message, then return. They join a meeting, then try to remember what they were doing. They open one system to find information, then another to confirm it, then a third to update it. The task remains technically “in progress”, but the mental cost of progressing it keeps increasing.
Work becomes slower, not because people lack capability, but because the system keeps making them restart.
In this team, many people do their best thinking in the morning. That is when they are more likely to have the mental resources and clarity required for high-quality decisions and value-adding work.
But their mornings are often filled with meetings, messages and immediate requests. So the most important work gets pushed later into the afternoon or even the evening.
By then, mental energy is lower. Attention is weaker. Work takes longer. Quality drops. Errors increase. People stay online later to compensate, which disrupts recovery and sleep. Over time, this creates a downward spiral: lower energy, poorer focus, slower execution, more mistakes and rising stress. The organisation then sees declining performance and may conclude that people need to work harder.
Everyone has two 90 to 120 minute periods of peak performance. One earlier in the day and one later in the afternoon or evening. Timing is based on your chronotype. 25% of the population are thought to be larks (early birds). If you are a lark you might experience your first period of peak performance shortly after waking, early in the morning and again early afternoon. If you are an owl (25% of the population), you naturally like to sleep later and wake later, so your first period of peak performance might be late morning or early afternoon. It is thought that 50% of the population are somewhere between a lark and an owl.
The deeper issue is that the current way of working is wasting human capacity. People are not short of hours. They are short of protected attention, clear priorities, visible work, useful boundaries, effective task management and healthy operating norms.
Over time, this begins to affect motivation too. The team starts losing its connection to purpose. People can see the volume of activity, but they struggle to see how their daily work connects to the strategy. Important priorities are hidden beneath urgent requests. Work becomes fragmented, reactive and transactional. Instead of feeling they are contributing to meaningful progress, people start to feel they are simply keeping the system moving.
When purpose is clear, people make better trade-offs. They know what to protect, what to challenge and what to stop doing. But when purpose becomes blurred, everything starts to feel equally important. People say yes to too many meetings, respond to every message and keep pushing strategic work into the margins.
Autonomy also begins to erode. These are capable professionals, but their working day gives them limited control over how they use their time and energy. Their calendars are shaped by other people’s priorities. Their attention is pulled by notifications. Their work is constantly interrupted. They are held accountable for outcomes, but are not given the conditions required to achieve those outcomes well.
This is where leadership matters. If leaders want better outcomes, they have to shape a culture where people can work more effectively. That means creating clarity on priorities, making work visible, protecting time for deep work, improving meeting discipline, setting healthier communication norms, embedding regular recovery and making it acceptable to focus without being seen as unavailable or unhelpful.
It also means shifting the signal of commitment. In many organisations, responsiveness is mistaken for contribution. Availability is mistaken for teamwork. Long hours are mistaken for high performance. Inbox speed is mistaken for reliability. Meeting attendance is mistaken for involvement.
But a healthier and more effective culture measures something different.
It measures progress on the work that matters. That shift is crucial because relatedness also begins to suffer in this team.
People are constantly communicating, but not necessarily feeling connected. They attend meetings, exchange messages and respond quickly to requests, but many do not feel properly supported. There is little time for meaningful conversation, reflection or shared problem-solving. The team is busy interacting, but not always building trust, belonging or mutual understanding.
As pressure increases, people become more isolated in their workload. They hesitate to ask for help because everyone else seems equally stretched. They may still be surrounded by colleagues, but they feel increasingly alone in the pressure. This weakens performance further. People do better work when they feel part of something, when they understand the purpose, when they have enough autonomy to manage their work intelligently, and when they feel supported by others. Without these conditions, motivation, judgement and discretionary effort decline.
The human cost rises too. People feel overwhelmed, stretched and mentally exhausted. They may still care deeply about the organisation and want to perform well, but the culture makes sustained high performance difficult. Stress increases. Recovery declines. Motivation suffers. Retention becomes harder. Attracting strong talent becomes more difficult when the organisation feels overloaded and unsustainable.
Sadly, this fictional team is not unusual. It represents a pattern seen across many global organisations.
Before asking people to work longer, leaders can ask:
This is not about working less for the sake of working less. It is about creating the conditions where people can produce better outcomes in fewer wasted hours. Time is realigned from non-value-adding tasks to those that create real value and impact.
Conditions in which people make better decisions. Strategic work moves faster. Quality improves. Stress reduces. Energy becomes more sustainable. Teams become more focused, more connected and more effective.
For senior leaders, the question is not whether people are working long or hard enough. The real question is whether the organisation’s culture is helping its best people create value, or quietly consuming their capacity before the most important work gets done.
What could you do to help create an enabling culture for sustainable high-performance?
[1] AI Doesn’t Reduce Work-It Intensifies It: https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it
[2] Gloria Mark's book and research: https://gloriamark.com/attention-span/
[3] The 2025 Work Trend Index Annual Report: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/2025-the-year-the-frontier-firm-is-born