Meetings that run over are costing you roughly five hours and $2,000 every single month, and three simple shifts can fix that. Lia walks through the agenda, the parking lot, and the end-of-meeting timer as a repeatable system to end on time, every time. This episode is most useful for owners, founders, and team leads who want to reclaim time without overhauling how their team works.
This episode is part of the 1:1s, Meetings & Time Management series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“…one of the biggest reasons we hit this is because as managers, we’re constantly context switching.”
“It takes us 23 minutes to refocus. So if you are going 30 minutes, 30 minutes, 30 minutes meeting after meeting after meeting…”
“…we’re actually not fully getting stuff on our plate. Often we’re starting something and stopping and jumping on another thing.”
“…not only do we leave all these open loops, we can send messages to folks that we didn’t even mean to, that we’re not really prioritizing them.”
Episode highlights
Why you end every Friday feeling behind
You mapped out the week. You had the list. And by Friday, 80 percent of it is untouched. Lia opens with a moment most leaders know too well: the sinking feeling at end of week when nothing feels finished. The culprit is not a lack of discipline. It is constant context switching, the invisible tax on every busy calendar.
The real cost of context switching
Research puts the refocus time after an interruption at 23 minutes. That means back-to-back 30-minute meetings are not just tiring. You are never fully mentally recovered before the next one starts. Lia names this pattern “chain smoking meetings” (a term from a previous guest, Carrie Jacobs) and points out that the Swiss-cheese calendar of 30-minute gaps is just as damaging. Those gaps look like work windows but are actually just reset time.
The second cost is less talked about: presence. When a leader is context switching mid-meeting, their team notices. Eyes drifting to a chat window, coming in seven minutes late to a one-on-one, mentally juggling three other fires. The message it sends to a direct report is that they are not a priority, even when the leader never intended that at all.
Planning your week before it starts
Lia’s first move is deceptively simple: look ahead. Before wrapping up Friday, scan the coming week for gaps, clusters, and opportunities to block focused time. Even when you cannot move existing meetings, knowing what is coming lets you pre-load the right mental context. If Monday is client problem-solving mode and Tuesday is workshop delivery mode, you can show up mentally prepared instead of opening your calendar cold every morning and letting it surprise you.
Group meetings by context, not just convenience
The bigger structural fix is consolidating similar meetings onto the same day. Many leaders Lia has coached put all their one-on-ones on Monday or Tuesday, whatever day works for their schedule or hybrid setup. The goal is not just saving time. It is keeping your mental mode consistent. A day of one-on-ones keeps you in team-development headspace. A day of project strategy keeps you in planning mode. Jumping from a one-on-one to a project strategy session to another one-on-one to a planning meeting inside a single day forces your brain to reboot over and over.
Color-code your calendar as a cognitive shortcut
Lia’s third tool is color-coding, and she uses it religiously. Her system: red for client commitments that cannot move, green for casual check-ins, blue for training or personal development, gray for focus blocks and breaks. The payoff is not aesthetics. A single glance at the week tells her what mode she needs to be in each day. A Wednesday heavy with red means full-on delivery mode. A Thursday of greens and blues signals a lighter, connective day. The brain starts to prepare before the calendar even opens.
The takeaway: reduce cognitive load, not meetings
Lia is clear that none of this requires blowing up your schedule. The goal is reducing the number of different contexts you have to inhabit in a single day. Fewer mental gear shifts means more of you shows up for each one, better presence with your team, more closed loops, and a Friday that actually feels like something got done.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 182: Still drowning in meetings? How to reclaim 5 or more hours every week as a manager. Most managers lose hours every week because they hold on tighter when they should be letting go. Lia walks through four concrete strategies, from stepping out of meetings and delegating with context to managing your own stress signals and naming the real cut line on your priority list. This episode is most useful for managers who feel perpetually behind and are unknowingly passing that stress straight down to their teams.
- Ep 127: How to save 5 to 10 hours a week as a leader (without burning out your team). Leaders lose hours every week to bloated meetings, manual processes, and context they never hand off. Lia walks through a repeatable system, calendar audits, meeting hygiene, process simplification, and intentional delegation, that can reclaim 5 to 10 hours a week for you and up to 30 to 40 hours a month across your team. This episode is especially useful for founders and corporate leaders whose teams have started to notice the overwhelm before they did.
- Ep 89: Why you need 1:1 meetings with every team member (and how to run them well). Yes, you need 1:1 meetings, and skipping them is quietly costing you retention, productivity, and trust. Lia walks through the Roses, Buds, Thorns framework and a highlights/lowlights structure you can run in as little as 10 minutes. This episode is especially useful for owners and leaders who feel too busy to add another standing meeting.
- Ep 76: How to optimize your meetings and save $2,000 a month. Meetings that run over are costing you roughly five hours and $2,000 every single month, and three simple shifts can fix that. Lia walks through the agenda, the parking lot, and the end-of-meeting timer as a repeatable system to end on time, every time. This episode is most useful for owners, founders, and team leads who want to reclaim time without overhauling how their team works.
Want to go deeper?
The New Manager Playbook. Lia’s bestselling guide to leading a team for the first time.
Full transcript (click to expand)
0:00
When am I going to get my head above water? When am I going to feel like I have that sense of accomplishment at the end of a week? What am I gonna feel like? I’m not drowning in tasks every single week, and this feeling is actually brought on by some of the reasons it is right. We’re probably involved in too many things, but one of the biggest reasons we hit this is because as managers, we’re constantly context switching.
Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where you get a masterclass in managing your team with ease in 15 minutes or less. I’m Lia Garvin, your host and team operations consultant for this show am I programs with small businesses and corporate teams. I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech into strategies to save you time money. Most of all, stress doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realize that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be.
Are a new manager learning the ropes, or are a seasoned manager ready to up their game? Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. From conflicts to feedback to delegating and more. We leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing. Kind of hate it and everything in between. Let’s go. Welcome back to the show. We’ve all been there. We have our week. We know this is going to be the week.
Monday morning we make our list. We have it all mapped out how we’re going to spend our time, who we’re going to meet with. We got our to do list. It’s all seems like yes, okay, this is going to be the week I finish everything. And then Friday rolls around and we look at our list and we’re like, gosh, I didn’t I didn’t finish 80% of this, maybe more. And you got pulled in so many different directions and pulled on and off.
And it was just like a week, like every week where nothing is what you expect and you end the day Friday, not feeling a sense of accomplishment. You feel pretty let down, like, When am I going to get my head above water? When am I going to feel like I have that sense of accomplishment at the end of a week? What am I gonna feel like? I’m not drowning in tasks every single week, and this feeling is actually brought on by some of the reasons it is right.
We’re probably involved in too many things, but one of the biggest reasons we hit this is because as managers, we’re constantly context switching. So that’s why I want to talk about today recognizing the context switching, seeing how often it happens. And then what do we do about it. Well, we can’t do a ton about it, but how do we manage that so that we don’t feel like we’re just in this endless hamster wheel of work? Because that’s where we start to burnout.
Okay, I think about 50% of managers report feeling burnt out, right? And we’re probably all like, well, I depends on the day. I might feel like 100% of them. If it’s the end of the year, or maybe Q1 or heading into a big, big milestone. We feel that way even worse when we’re jumping from one thing to the next. And our life and our job is a game of whac-a-mole. So let’s talk about the cost of cost of context witching.
Well, it’s been it’s been research that context swishing and jumping on and off a task. It takes us 23 minutes to refocus. So if you are going 30 minutes, 30 minutes, 30 minutes meeting after meeting after meeting, this is what a colleague of mine, Carrie Jacobs, she was on the podcast calls chain smoking meetings. When you’re going from meeting to meeting to meeting and they’re all 30 minutes, you are literally context switching and you haven’t even recovered from that until you’re 23 minutes almost over with that next meeting.
If you are or have your calendar and it’s kind of a Swiss cheese thing where you have a meeting and then 30 minutes and then an hour, then 30 minutes each of those 30 minutes when you had allocated to like quickly get stuff done. That whole block of time is just reset, centering yourself and figuring out, okay, where was I at getting your bearings. So one of the biggest problems of why we can feel so incomplete with finishing everything, and why we feel like it’s just adding and adding and adding is that we’re actually not fully getting stuff on our plate.
Often we’re starting something and stopping and jumping on another thing. And we’re we’re helping someone solve a problem, and we’re going in and giving a report on on progress. And we actually are just opening new loops. We’re not closing as many because of this context switching. Now, the other cost of it is that we’re not fully present, and I think that can be one of the biggest things that our team members start to notice, right? That we’re in a meeting with them and we seem distracted.
Or maybe we’re kind of eyes glancing back at our chat window, our emails, and this starts to send a signal to our team members that we’re not really interested in what they’re talking about. I know I’ve been on the receiving end of that. I’m in a meeting my one on one with my manager I’ve looked forward to all week because I had a lot of stuff to talk about, and first they come in seven minutes late to a 30 minute meeting, so like a third of the way through.
And then they keep going. Oh wait, I got to check this ping or oh wait, like, let me just look at this thing or they don’t say it and I could see their eyes looking somewhere else. Right. This doesn’t make me feel very good as a direct report at all in that manager. Most likely they it wasn’t their fault, they were just pulling so many directions they thought, I can’t look away from this for a second.
So this kind of thing, not only do we leave all these open loops, we can send messages to folks that we didn’t even mean to, that we’re not really prioritizing them. Do you want some hands on support for all of the topics I talk about on this show? Like a team expert who has worked within tech giants like Apple and Google, as well as small businesses on hand to help you delegate and get out of the weeds, handle tough conversations with team members within your hiring strategy, and get your teams to help bring in more revenue.
Then it’s time to sign up for my team Whisper Consulting sprint for 90 days. You have me in your back pocket to help you navigate any and every issue happening on your team. DM me the word Sprint on Instagram or email me at [email protected] and let’s build your unstoppable team. So what do we do about it? Because we know this is a problem. And I think any of us that are thinking of like, yeah, how many times we start and stop and shift focus is that it’s exhausting, even just like thinking about the number of times we’re doing that.
Well, what do we do about it? There’s a couple of things that I think right off the bat, like, you can pause this episode and do these or do that right at the end of the episode and figure this out, make it a little bit of relief for yourself. And I’m going to say one caveat. Obviously, if we are distributed across a lot of different projects or we’re wearing many hats in our team, the context switching is going to have to happen.
But there’s a couple things that we can do. First and foremost is to really kind of actively plan each week, like look ahead at what is my weekend to look like. Okay, so I like to do this at the end of every Friday before I close up for the weekend. And let’s be honest, I’m a business owner, so it’s not like I’m not looking at my emails over the weekend. But when I try to wrap up my week, I look at the next week and I’m like, okay, where do I have a bunch of holes in my calendar?
Where can I put some things back to back? Where can I create a block of space? Now, you may not be able to do this with that short of notice, but you could maybe look two, three, four weeks ahead and start to block out chunks of time when you can have focused time. So maybe you found, you know, Wednesday afternoons are pretty quiet. Friday mornings, maybe you put a block on your calendar and it’s focused time.
And you know that this is some up time where I’m not going to have the rock and whac-a-mole. I’m not going to do one thing that I’m actually going to focus on Project time. So I don’t have to use any context switching during that. That’s one thing. Actively planning your week. It may not be the week ahead. I like doing that anyway. Even if you can’t change meetings, knowing in advance what’s coming actually sort of helps you pre eliminate some of that context switching time.
For example, if I know hey, on Monday I have a few client meetings. On Tuesday I’m running a big workshop. On Thursday I am doing some manager coaching, let’s say like I know that’s coming. I can think, okay, so Monday I really have to be thinking kind of like problem solving mode. Tuesday I’m more like on on because I’m doing a workshop, right? I have to be like really kind of that on stage feeling Wednesdays a little bit more.
For so it was Wednesday. It’s like more creative whenever it looks like that can actually pre like set your mind to be in the right headspace because you’re not just open up the calendar. Like, what do you got for me today? Okay. The other thing I strongly suggest is grouping meetings that you are owners of into like common things into one day. So a lot of managers I’ve worked with do all their one on ones on Monday or Tuesday.
So let’s say Monday is a good day for you because you’re working from home and you kind of start the week. You get everybody going for the week. Maybe you do all your one on ones on Mondays. For other folks that are doing a hybrid schedule, they like to do their one of them ones in person, so they do them on Tuesdays when they’re in the office, because that’s when their team members will be there. And then they do those.
Then they get that face time with their team members. They know that on Tuesdays, that’s when we get things rolling. And so then they’re not context switching from like one on one mode to like project strategy mode. They’re in that same headspace. So looking across and really, you know, getting a sense of the week and figuring out, well, again, for meetings, you’re, you’re the owner of or where you do have that control over the schedule, consolidating those.
And then the last thing I’m going to say is I have found this to be one of the best gifts. I color code my calendar. Like religiously. I have different types of meetings. Red I have are like emergency, can’t move. So this is anything with clients, anything that’s like, someone’s hired me to do that. I’m providing for someone. Those are red. I have if it’s kind of a, like a casual check in or something with someone to catch up, I have that in green.
If it is something that like a training I’m attending or something like a personal development, I have that in blue. I’m just sharing my colors, just kind of. And then if it’s a block, I have like a lunch break. So don’t forget to like take a walk or if I’m blocked out, I have that in gray, right? So that helps me when I’m just like, okay, what’s coming my way? Take a glance. I see like, oh, Wednesdays are at like I got to be on and I see Thursday it’s it’s actually mostly, greens and blue.
So it’s mostly kind of that professional development or connecting with folks that’s going to be a lighter day. So now conceptually I’m not context switching the whole time because I know it’s headed towards me. So those are a few of the strategies that I’ve found really useful for reducing the sense of I’m pulled in this direction. I have to be thinking in this way from that way. And I don’t necessarily mean like you’re getting rid of all your meetings, but that you’re sort of reducing the context of how you’re showing up as a leader.
So I mentioned consolidating all your one on ones. That doesn’t just mean having one one on one. Your whole mindset that day is one on one team development that that’s like one context. And then maybe you have project meetings and that’s another. And then maybe you have like a long term strategy. That’s the context I’m talking about because that’s where it gets tough. If you had a one on one, now you have a project strategy meeting.
Now you have another one on one. Now you’re doing a planning meeting. Now you have, you know, a team lunch. Like, like all of that requires different things of you see what I’m saying? So it doesn’t mean we we blow up the whole schedule, but it’s kind of like grouping things together to reduce that cognitive load. All right. I’m so curious to hear how this goes. So if you try this out or when you try this out, please, please send me an email or a message on LinkedIn and tell me, yeah, this grouping on my calendar or color coding it, or kind of figuring out, well, how can I, consolidate what on what days?
Or even looking ahead at the schedule, which of these tools works for you? I’m really curious to hear and please, if you have other tools that have helped you with this context switching, we all want to hear about it. So send me a message on LinkedIn or an email at [email protected], and I will share that on the on a future episode of like what other folks found valuable because it’s really fun to hear from you. All right.
And what’s also fun is to pick up a copy of my new book, The New Manager Playbook, coming out January 27th. If it’s already past that, it is on Amazon. I am so excited to share this with you. It has got all the tips, tricks, tools you need to manage with confidence and ease. Not going to miss this one. All right, see you next time. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive.
With that said, let’s spread the word. If you love this episode, please pass it along to someone who might benefit from it. See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
Why does my to-do list never get done even when I plan my week?
The biggest reason your list stays unfinished is context switching. Every time you jump from a meeting to a task to another meeting, it takes your brain about 23 minutes to fully refocus. So those 30-minute gaps between meetings that you planned to use for actual work? Most of that time gets eaten up just getting your bearings again. You're opening new loops instead of closing them, and by Friday it feels like nothing got done even though you were busy all week.
How do I design my calendar to stop feeling overwhelmed and pulled in every direction?
Group similar meetings together on the same day instead of scattering them across the week. If you own your one-on-ones, put them all on Monday or Tuesday so your whole mindset that day stays in team-development mode. Then block focused project time on quieter days like Wednesday afternoons or Friday mornings. Looking ahead at the full week, even if you can't move anything, helps you mentally pre-load the right headspace for each day instead of opening your calendar and getting blindsided by whatever shows up.
Does color coding your calendar actually help with productivity?
Yes, and it works because it gives you a fast visual read of what kind of mental energy each day will demand before the day even starts. You can assign colors by meeting type, for example red for locked client commitments, green for casual check-ins, blue for personal development, and gray for focus blocks or breaks. When you glance at Thursday and see mostly greens and blues, you know it's a lighter connection day. That kind of advance awareness reduces the cognitive whiplash of jumping between very different modes of thinking.
How does constant meeting-hopping affect my team members?
When you are jumping from meeting to meeting without recovery time, you show up distracted. Your team members notice when your eyes drift to your chat window or when you arrive late to a one-on-one. Even if you never say a word, that behavior sends a signal that you are not prioritizing them. It is not about bad intentions. It is about a schedule that never gives you space to be fully present. Consolidating your meetings by type so you are not switching contexts every 30 minutes helps you actually show up for the people who need you.
What is the best time to plan your upcoming week to reduce stress?
The end of Friday is a great time to look at the week ahead. Before you close out, scan your calendar for where you have gaps, where you can batch similar meetings back to back, and where you can protect a block of focused time. If your schedule is too locked to shift things on short notice, look two to four weeks out and start blocking time before it fills up. Even if you cannot change a single meeting, knowing in advance what is coming helps your brain pre-load the right mindset instead of context switching all day in real time.