A day full of meetings: why you feel empty even though you got nothing done

Half past five in the afternoon. You end the last call, put your headphones down and look at the to-do list you wrote this morning with the best of intentions. Not a single item is crossed off. Since nine o’clock you have been in seven meetings, answered a few dozen messages in between, explained the same thing to someone twice, and put out a fire that nobody present had started. And yet you feel as if you have done nothing.

“How can I be this tired,” you ask yourself, “when all I did all day was sit and talk?”

I hear this question more often than I would have expected. It usually comes with a quiet reproach: that you are badly organised, that you can’t prioritise, that other people manage more. In this piece I would like to show that the tiredness after a day of meetings is very real and has clear causes — in how attention works, in what screens ask of us, and in what happens between people in meetings. Work you can’t see on your list is still work.

A tiredness that isn’t in your calendar

Your calendar shows meetings as neatly arranged rectangles: one after another, half an hour or an hour each. What it doesn’t show is what happens between them and inside them. Every meeting means getting into a new topic, working out who is in the room and what they expect of you, following the conversation, deciding when to say something, and taking something away at the end. Then putting all of that down within two minutes and starting again.

In a study published in 2006, Steven Rogelberg and colleagues showed that the number of meetings a person has in a day is linked to greater fatigue and a sense of being overloaded — especially among people for whom finishing their tasks matters a great deal. That is interesting: it is not only the meetings that tire us, but also the tension between the meetings and the work that waits between them and can’t get done.

When the meetings are on screen, something else is added. In a 2021 theoretical paper, Jeremy Bailenson of Stanford listed four reasons why video calls can be especially draining: faces look at you from close up all the time, you have to work harder to send and read non-verbal cues, you watch yourself all day as if in a mirror, and you have to stay in one place to remain in the frame. I will say more about each of these, but one thing is already clear: “just sitting and talking” is not just sitting and talking.

Switching is not free

For several decades, psychologists have studied what happens when a person switches from one task to another. The finding is remarkably consistent: switching has a cost. When you move to a new task, you not only have to remember what needs doing, you also have to “put away” the rules of the previous task and load the new ones. That takes time, even if only a fraction of a second, and the time adds up. Stephen Monsell summarised this research in 2003, and as early as 2001 Joshua Rubinstein, David Meyer and Jeffrey Evans showed that the cost of switching is higher when tasks are more complex or less familiar.

A day full of meetings is a day of constant switching. At nine the budget, at half past nine a new colleague, at ten a customer complaint, at eleven next year’s strategy. Each of these topics asks for a different way of thinking, a different tone and a different part of you. When you feel in the evening as if you have been pulled in every direction, that is not a metaphor. That is how your attention spent the day.

Attention residue

In 2009, Sophie Leroy described a phenomenon she called attention residue. When you switch away from a task you haven’t finished, part of your attention stays with it. Physically you are already in the next meeting, but mentally you are still writing the conclusion of the last one. In her experiments, people who left the previous task unfinished performed worse on the next one.

On a day of meetings, the residue piles up. Hardly any meeting truly ends — each leaves behind a question, a task or a sense of unease. By five o’clock you are sitting in the seventh meeting with the residue of the previous six. No wonder you can barely hear yourself think. And no wonder you can’t get round to that one real task in the evening: the attention it needs is scattered across the whole day.

In 2018, Leroy and Theresa Glomb also showed what helps: before you switch, you briefly note where you have got to and what the next step is. They called this a ready-to-resume plan. The mind lets go more easily because it knows the thing has not been lost. I will come back to this in the exercise.

Video calls: what we know and what we don’t

I want to be careful here. Bailenson’s 2021 paper is theoretical: it puts forward reasonable explanations of why video calls might be tiring, but it does not prove them conclusively. The research group around him then developed a questionnaire to measure video-call fatigue so that these explanations could be tested. The first findings are in line with expectations, but the field is young and much is still unclear — for example, how much of the fatigue is due to the screen and how much simply to the fact that we now have more meetings than before.

So I would not claim that video calls are “bad”. I am only saying they have a few features an in-person meeting does not: a face on the screen that is closer than you would ever let it be in real life; a mirror in which you constantly see and judge yourself; and a body that must not move, or it will drop out of the frame. Each of these is small. Together, seven times a day, they are no longer small.

Some of this is easy to change. If you can, hide your self-view. In meetings where you don’t need to be seen, turn the camera off. On phone calls, stand up and walk. These are not big solutions, but they tell your body it is not trapped.

The meeting as a stage where the whole system plays

Everything so far has been about attention and screens. But in relational family therapy, which I am training in, I am interested in something else too: what happens between people in meetings. A workplace is a system much like a family. It has roles, alliances, unwritten rules and triangles. And a meeting is the place where the whole system shows itself at once, live, in front of everyone.

In a meeting you don’t only listen to the content. You notice that your manager crossed his arms when one colleague made a suggestion. You notice that two people from another department have exchanged a look for the third time. You know which topics are not to be opened, who will take offence if you don’t mention them, and when something needs softening so it doesn’t blow up. The sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined the term emotional labour for this kind of work — managing your own feelings in order to create the right mood in others. On a day full of meetings, you do a great deal of it.

Especially if your role in the system is that of the one who smooths things over. People who grew up in tense families often have an extraordinarily precise radar for other people’s moods — in professional terms, this can be called hypervigilance. In a meeting, that radar is switched on the whole time. Outwardly the person seems calm, but inside they are tracking everything and adjusting everything. No wonder they are exhausted afterwards, even if they spoke only a few sentences. I have written about how this pattern shows up in relationships more generally in People-pleasing: when your worth is in other people’s hands; and why some people prefer to stay quiet in meetings is the subject of Silent in meetings: why you don’t say what you think.

Why it feels as if you did nothing

Tiredness is one thing. The other is a feeling of emptiness — that the day was lost. This feeling has its own logic. Most of us measure our day by things we can show: a document sent, a project delivered, a line crossed off. Meetings, however, rarely leave anything tangible behind. Their output is decisions, alignment and relationships — all things that are necessary but invisible.

For people whose worth is closely tied to productivity, this invisibility hurts. In the evening, when the day is over, they don’t think “today I helped the team reach agreement”, but “today I got nothing done”. So they stay late at work or sit down at the computer in the evening to get “at least something” done. And so a day of meetings stretches into an evening of work, and an evening of work into poorer sleep. A conversation you probably know (composed, not a real person):

“At the computer again? You’ve been at work all day.”
“I’ve been in meetings all day. That’s not the same.”
“What was it, then?”
“I don’t know. Talking. Now I have to actually work.”
“And when will you rest?”
“When it’s done.”

“When it’s done” is a sentence that never comes true on meeting days, because the work is always pushed into the time meant for rest. This pattern is common in people who seem to have everything under control on the outside while running constantly on the inside — it is described in High-functioning anxiety.

Time for deep work as a boundary

In his book Deep Work (2016), Cal Newport described the difference between shallow and deep work. Shallow work is messages, coordination and short tasks you can do even while distracted. Deep work is what requires uninterrupted attention: writing, planning, solving a difficult problem. It is exactly this work that runs out on a day of meetings — because it needs unbroken time that the calendar does not offer.

If you want deep work to have room, it has to be protected just like a meeting. A block of time in your calendar that others see as busy. A morning without calls. A day of the week when no meetings are called. This is not only a matter of organisation but a boundary — and like any boundary in a system, it will probably meet resistance. A short explanation of why is in the knowledge base under boundaries.

If you lead a team, you have particular power here. The way your calendar is arranged is a signal to the team about what is normal. If you have seven meetings a day, the people around you will find it hard to defend their empty morning.

Exercise: a day of meetings that doesn’t drain you completely

You don’t need to do this exercise perfectly. Pick one day next week when you have a lot of meetings and try all five steps.

1. In the morning, write down one thing that really matters. Not a list of ten tasks, but one thing that would give you the feeling the day was yours. Then find at least half an hour for it in your calendar — even if you have to book it as a meeting with yourself.
2. At the end of every meeting, take a minute for a ready-to-resume plan. In one line, note where you left off and what the next step is. This helps your mind let go.
3. Stand up between meetings. Even if you only have two minutes: go to the window, pour yourself some water, stretch. Give your body a signal that one thing has ended and another is beginning.
4. In meetings, notice how much you are “reading the room”. Not to change it — just notice. Where you tracked other people’s moods, where you softened something, where you held back a thought. That is work you did.
5. In the evening, write two lists. On one, what you did visibly. On the other, what you did invisibly: decisions you helped with, tensions you calmed, people you supported. Then allow the day to be over.

Many people find the last step the hardest. When you allow yourself to count invisible work as work, the urge to “get something done” in the evening often eases as well. What helps in the time after work is described in the entry on rest.

Where this explanation falls short

I don’t want this piece to sound as if meetings are always bad. Some meetings are the work itself: decisions are made there, people who would otherwise work past each other get aligned, and sometimes conflicts are prevented that would cost far more than an hour of talking. For some people, contact with others is a source of energy, not a strain — after a day of conversations they feel enlivened, and after a day alone they feel drained. For them, this piece is only partly true.

The research I have cited has its limits too. Attention residue and switching costs are well studied in the laboratory, but everyday work is more complicated than an experiment. And about video-call fatigue, as I said, we know less than is sometimes written. So I invite you to use these findings as a mirror, not a verdict: check which of them apply to you.

And when the tiredness is not only on meeting days but every day, including weekends and holidays, the explanation is probably not in your calendar. Exhaustion like that can be a sign of burnout, depression or a physical illness — from iron deficiency to thyroid problems. If it lasts for several weeks, talk to your GP. The signs that it is more than a bad week are described in Burnout is not laziness: signs your nervous system is asking for a break. And if you feel that what drains you most is the role you play in the team rather than the meetings themselves, Why it is the most responsible and reliable people who burn out may be closer to home.

If you would like to talk about this in person, I also work with English-speaking clients in Ljubljana.

What to remember

• The tiredness after a day of meetings is real: every switch has a cost, and unfinished topics leave attention residue behind.
• Video calls carry some extra strain, but the research on them is still young — treat the explanations as possible, not final.
• In a meeting you don’t only listen to the content; you read the whole system. That emotional labour is work, even if it isn’t on your list.
• Time for deep work is a boundary that needs protecting just like a meeting.
• If the tiredness is there every day for several weeks, the explanation is probably not in your calendar — talk to your doctor.