by Bruno

😩 The Meeting Dilemma

In the tech industry, there’s a shared dread that binds us together: opening your calendar on Monday to discover a week packed to the brim with meetings. For individual contributors (ICs), this scenario is particularly nightmarish. We’re judged primarily on output and deliverables, yet the sprint where you failed to complete Project X due to an avalanche of meetings is rarely remembered in your annual performance review. What sticks is simply that you “didn’t deliver on time.”

This problem likely sounds all too familiar. Throughout my career as an IC, I’ve constantly had the nagging feeling that my productive time was being eroded by meetings, but I never had concrete data to back this up. Was I actually spending too much time in meetings, or did it just feel that way? And importantly, even if I knew the percentage of time spent in meetings, that alone wouldn’t tell the whole story. The quality of my remaining time mattered just as much.

🔍 Quantifying the Problem

I needed a solution that addressed two key challenges:

1. Accessing calendar data: Many calendar solutions don’t provide easy ways to extract and analyse this information especially when it comes to company calendars, but I didn’t want to overengineer a solution.

2. Measuring focus time quality: Simply saying “40% of my day was in meetings” doesn’t paint a complete picture. Having 40% of your day consumed by meetings scattered throughout in 30-minute chunks is vastly different from having them consolidated in a single block.

I also wanted to establish reasonable targets. What percentage of time should ICs spend in meetings? Based on some personal research, something between 20-35% seems reasonable for most ICs, though this varies by seniority and role. Staff-level engineers and above often need more meeting time depending on their archetype [Will Larson’s “Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track”].

🤖 A Simple LLM-Powered Solution

Rather than wrestling with APIs and permissions, I opted for simplicity. Using my current favourite LLM Claude 3.7 Sonnet, I uploaded screenshots of my calendar (note you don’t need detail, just the blocked out slots is enough) and asked it to digitise my schedule. The LLM identified my meetings slots allowing me to calculate how much of my effective working time was consumed by meetings.

I established working parameters: 9am to 5:30pm workday with one hour for lunch, giving me 7.5 hours of “effective” working time daily. I excluded focus time blocks, lunch, and other intentional time-blocking elements from the meeting calculations.

This gave me my meeting percentage, but I still needed a way to quantify the quality of my work day – which led me to develop the Focus Quality Score (FQS).

⏱️ The Focus Quality Score (FQS)

The FQS measures how fragmented your day is on a scale from 0-10. The premise is simple but powerful: longer uninterrupted blocks of time are exponentially more valuable than shorter ones.

Why? Because deep work follows a non-linear productivity curve:

• There’s a significant “startup cost” to reaching a flow state (typically 15-30 minutes)
• Each additional uninterrupted hour compounds your effectiveness
• Context switching between small time blocks creates cognitive overhead
• Complex problems often require sustained attention to solve effectively

I set the ideal day as having two 3-hour focus blocks, which would score a perfect 10/10. To calculate the score, I square the length of each free time block (in hours), sum these values, and compare to the theoretical maximum of 18 points (3² + 3² = 18). Then I just compare the block quality score against the maximum of 18 points, multiply it by 10, and round to the nearest whole number.

For example:

• A 15-minute block = 0.25² = 0.06 points
• A 1-hour block = 1² = 1 point
• A 3-hour block = 3² = 9 points

I chose a squared exponent pattern deliberately to emphasise how dramatically more valuable longer time blocks are. A 3-hour block isn’t just 3 times better than a 1-hour block – it’s potentially 9 times more valuable.

🤔 Understanding Your FQS Score

Over the past two months, I’ve tracked my own schedule meticulously, not just recording meeting times but also journaling daily during work days. In these journals, I note what happened, my subjective rating of each day, any conflicts that arose, and days that felt particularly unproductive. By adding the FQS calculation to each day’s analysis, I’ve been able to correlate the scores with real-world experiences.

What’s important to understand about the FQS is that it follows a roughly normal distribution centered around 5. This means even a score of 4 isn’t horrible—it’s just slightly below average. To put this in perspective, a score of 4 might mean you have a continuous 2-hour focus block in your day, which isn’t ideal but certainly isn’t catastrophic. Contrast this with having 3 hours of “free time” chopped up into six 30-minute increments—despite having more total non-meeting time, this scenario would yield a much lower FQS.

Based on my observations, here’s how to interpret your FQS score:

• 0-2: Truly horrible. This is a productivity nightmare with virtually no meaningful focus time.
• 3-4: Not good, but workable for routine tasks. You’ll struggle with anything requiring deep thought.
• 4-6: This is what a “normal” busy day typically looks like. You can get work done, but not the kind requiring deep concentration. Unfortunately, this mediocre range has become the norm for many ICs.
• 6-7: Pretty good! You have substantial blocks of focus time.
• 7+: Amazing! No matter how you analyze it, a score above 7 means you had both few meetings and plenty of continuous focus time. While there’s always room for improvement, you’re already in an excellent position.

It’s worth noting that high scores are deliberately difficult to achieve—that’s part of the design. Getting anything above a 7 should be seen as exceptional, not the baseline expectation.

📊 Real-World Examples

Let’s look at two real days from my calendar that perfectly illustrate why meeting percentage alone doesn’t tell the whole story. Both days have identical meeting loads, but dramatically different focus quality scores.

🔄 Same Meeting Load, Different Experience

Date	Meeting %	Focus Quality Score (FQS)
March 27, 2025	43.3%	6.4/10 ✅
March 19, 2025	43.3%	2.3/10 ❌

📅 March 27, 2025 (Thursday)

Schedule Breakdown:

Time	Activity	Duration
09:00 - 09:30	Free time	0.5 hrs
09:30 - 09:45	Team Alignment	0.25 hrs
09:45 - 10:30	Free time	0.75 hrs
10:30 - 11:15	Whiteboarding	0.75 hrs
11:15 - 11:30	Business Health Check	0.5 hrs
11:30 - 12:00	Free time	0.5 hrs
12:00 - 13:00	Lunch	-
13:00 - 14:00	1:1 & Data Events Analysis	1.5 hrs
14:00 - 14:15	Daily stand-up	0.25 hrs
14:15 - 17:30	Free time (includes focus blocks)	3.25 hrs

Metrics:

• Meeting time: 3.25 hours
• Meeting percentage: 43.3%
• Free time percentage: 56.7%
• Focus Quality Score: 6.4/10

FQS Calculation:

• Raw block quality: 0.5² + 0.75² + 0.5² + 3.25² = 0.25 + 0.5625 + 0.25 + 10.5625 = 11.625
• Focus Quality Score: (11.625 ÷ 18) × 10 = 6.46/10

Key insight: Despite having over 43% of the day in meetings, this day scores well because of the large 3.25-hour uninterrupted block in the afternoon, which contributes significantly to the FQS (10.56 of the 11.625 points).

📅 March 19, 2025 (Wednesday)

Schedule Breakdown:

Time	Activity	Duration
09:00 - 09:30	Free time (Daily Planning)	0.5 hrs
09:30 - 10:00	Leads Catchup	0.5 hrs
10:00 - 10:30	1:1	0.5 hrs
10:30 - 11:00	1:1	0.5 hrs
11:00 - 11:30	Free time	0.5 hrs
11:30 - 12:00	Data Sync	0.5 hrs
12:00 - 13:00	Lunch	-
13:00 - 14:00	Free time	1.0 hrs
14:00 - 14:15	Daily stand-up	0.25 hrs
14:15 - 14:30	Free time	0.25 hrs
14:30 - 15:00	Office Hours	0.5 hrs
15:00 - 15:30	Free time	0.5 hrs
15:30 - 16:00	Feature Discussion	0.5 hrs
16:00 - 17:30	Free time	1.5 hrs

Metrics:

• Meeting time: 3.25 hours
• Meeting percentage: 43.3%
• Free time percentage: 56.7%
• Focus Quality Score: 2.3/10

FQS Calculation:

• Raw block quality: 0.5² + 0.5² + 1.0² + 0.25² + 0.5² + 1.5² = 0.25 + 0.25 + 1 + 0.0625 + 0.25 + 2.25 = 4.0625
• Focus Quality Score: (4.0625 ÷ 18) × 10 = 2.26/10

Key insight: Despite having the exact same meeting percentage as March 27th, this day scores terribly because the free time is fragmented into six smaller blocks, with the largest being only 1.5 hours.

💡 The Power of the FQS

The stark contrast between these two days demonstrates why the FQS is so valuable. Both days have identical meeting loads of 43.3%, but March 27th feels manageable and productive with its FQS of 6.4, while March 19th feels chaotic and frustrating with its FQS of 2.3.

This difference is entirely due to how the meetings are arranged. On March 27th, meetings are more clustered, creating larger blocks of free time—especially that valuable 3.25-hour afternoon block. On March 19th, meetings are scattered throughout the day, creating a “Swiss cheese” schedule that makes deep work nearly impossible.

The FQS helps quantify why some days with even heavy meeting loads can still feel productive if those meetings are clustered, while others feel hopelessly fragmented.

What was particularly concerning from my analysis was discovering that I consistently exceeded my target range of 20-35% meeting time, often reaching 45-47% across multiple weeks. Equally concerning were numerous days with FQS scores below 4, indicating severely fragmented time.

💪 Time to Take Action

If you’re an IC who feels constantly torn between meetings and actual work, I encourage you to perform this analysis on your own calendar. The insights might surprise you – and more importantly, they provide concrete data you can use to advocate for change.

Consider the FQS as a measure of your day’s quality, not just quantity. A day with a high FQS score is likely to be more productive and less stressful, even if it contains a moderate meeting load.

By identifying and quantifying this problem, we take the first crucial step toward solving it. The next steps involve setting boundaries, clustering meetings, establishing no-meeting days or blocks, and helping teams understand the true cost of fragmented time for IC productivity. This is for a later time or someone else to solve!

After all, in a world where we’re all trying to deliver high-quality work, the quality of our time deserves just as much attention as the quantity.

Peace and Love.