Advita Patel said something on Corey-osity Unleashed I keep turning over. If you walk out of a meeting exhausted, don't book another one straight after it. Go outside. Stretch. Put a song on.
My first reaction was a shrug. Of course you should take a break. Everyone knows this.
Then I opened my calendar. Nobody does this. I don't do this. Most engineering leaders I've worked with run the opposite way. We stack the hard meetings back to back, call it efficiency, and wonder why the afternoon goes sideways.
The Meeting You'd Rate a Four
Advita has a habit of rating the people in her life out of ten on energy. Do they give it, or take it?
Try the same score on your meetings.
Some are a nine. The architecture review where the room argues well and you leave buzzing. The demo where the team shows off something they built.
Some are a four. The incident review after a bad weekend. The stakeholder who wants a date you won't commit to. The performance conversation you've been dreading for a week. You walk out of a four drained, a little rattled, still replaying the last ten minutes.
Now look at what sits in the next slot.
Too often it's a one-to-one with an engineer who has waited two weeks to talk about their career. Or a code review. Or a hiring panel where a candidate gets forty-five minutes to make their case.
Who shows up to those meetings? The four-out-of-ten version of you. The person in front of you never saw the meeting before. They only see the leader who seems distracted, short, or flat. They take it personally. Why wouldn't they?
What Your Brain Does Between Calls
In 2021, Microsoft's Human Factors Lab put EEG caps on 14 people and ran them through four 30-minute video meetings. In one session the meetings ran back to back. In the other, each meeting had a 10-minute break between them, spent meditating with Headspace. The groups then swapped.
The researchers tracked beta waves, the brain activity associated with stress.
Back to back, average beta activity climbed across the two hours. Stress built on stress. With breaks, it held steady across all four meetings. The break reset the brain before the next call started.
The finding I keep thinking about: for the back-to-back group, the transition itself caused a spike. Ending one call and dropping into the next was a stress event of its own.
Michael Bohan, from the Microsoft team behind the study, made the point in plain terms. Breaks matter for more than end-of-day tiredness. They improve your ability to focus and engage while you're in the meetings.
Fourteen people is a small study, and Microsoft sells meeting software. I wouldn't hang a policy on it alone. It lines up with older work, though. Alexandra Luong and Steven Rogelberg had employees keep daily meeting diaries for a week. More meetings meant more daily fatigue and a heavier sense of workload. They framed meetings as interruptions and daily hassles. Anyone who has run a team for a year will nod at both findings.
Engineers Pay Twice for Your Calendar
Paul Graham wrote Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule in 2009, and it still describes most software teams I meet.
Managers chop the day into one-hour slots. Makers, the people writing code, need half a day at a time. His point: one meeting commonly blows half a day, because it breaks a morning or afternoon into pieces too small for anything hard. He compares a meeting on a maker's day to throwing an exception. It doesn't switch the task. It changes the whole mode of work.
Here's the part leaders miss. Your drained state doesn't stay in your calendar. It leaks into theirs.
You leave a four, skip the recovery, and drop into the team's channel with a sharp question. Somebody stops what they were doing to answer it. You rush a pull request approval because you have three minutes before the next call. You give a vague answer to a design question and the engineer burns an afternoon guessing what you meant.
I wrote about leaders setting the interruption timer for their teams in Your Team Gets 47 Seconds of Focus. You Set the Timer. Back-to-back meetings are where the habit starts. A leader with no gaps in the day lives in reaction mode, and reaction mode is contagious.
Design Recovery In. Don't Hope For It.
Recovery doesn't happen by accident. If you leave it to chance, the calendar wins every time. Somebody will always grab the empty half hour.
So build it in.
1. Score a week of meetings
For five days, write a number out of ten after every meeting. Energy, not usefulness. A useful meeting still drains you sometimes.
You'll see the pattern by Wednesday. The same recurring meetings land at three or four every week. Those are your targets.
2. Put the buffer after the fours
Don't spread breaks evenly across the day. Put them where the damage happens. Ten minutes after each four, blocked as a real event with a name. "Recovery" works. Your assistant or your team won't book over a named block as fast as an empty gap.
Google Calendar has a speedy meetings setting, and Outlook has an option to end meetings early. Turn them on. A 25-minute default gives you five minutes back without a single conversation.
3. Move the people who need your best self
Look at who sits straight after your fours. Move them.
Career conversations, one-to-ones with struggling engineers, and interviews deserve your best hour, not your worst. Put them after a nine, or first thing, before the day has worn you down.
4. Leave the screen
Advita's list was fresh air, a stretch, a song. None of those involve Slack.
Switching from a video call to your inbox isn't a break. It's another meeting with worse lighting. The Microsoft study used meditation for a reason. Your brain needs a gap with nothing to process.
5. Protect your team's calendar the same way
Graham's fix at Y Combinator was office hours at the end of his day, so meetings with founders never split an afternoon. Copy the idea. Cluster your team's meetings. Guard their long blocks. Don't drop a 30-minute sync into the middle of someone's morning because it suited your gaps.
Rest Isn't Weakness. It's Maintenance.
I noticed Brazil's vote to end the six-day working week trending on Reddit this week. Whole countries are arguing about how much rest people deserve. Meanwhile most of us won't give ourselves ten minutes between two calls.
Nobody would run a production server at 100% CPU all day and act surprised when it falls over. We build in headroom because we know load spikes. Your calendar deserves the same engineering.
The leaders I respect most don't have the emptiest calendars. They know which meetings cost them, and they pay the bill before the next person walks in.
So open tomorrow's calendar. Find your four. Who is booked straight after it, and don't they deserve better?