Not Every Meeting Costs the Same. Planning Meetings Hit Focus Hardest. One-on-Ones Barely Registered.

You don't have a meeting problem. You have a meeting-type problem.

Researchers in Switzerland just published a study at ESEM 2026, a peer-reviewed software engineering conference. First they surveyed 55 practitioners. 76.4% said they got less done on high-meeting days. Unclear purpose and meetings that run too long topped the complaint list.

Then they did something most meeting research skips. For two weeks they had people rate each meeting right after it ended, then file an end-of-day report, and pulled the meeting details straight from calendar data.

Here's what came back. Planning meetings were the most disruptive to focus. One-on-ones were the least. Ad-hoc meetings were among the most useful. And on days with more meetings, people reported lower productivity, less deep work, and the lowest energy.

Let me be straight about the limits. It's a small sample of software teams. The authors call the type comparisons exploratory, and the daily pattern showed up between people, not within the same person day to day. They treat these as hypotheses, not law.

But here's the thing. You run a brokerage or a team, and your calendar is full of planning. Sales meetings. Pipeline reviews. The weekly huddle that drifts to 75 minutes.

Do this before Friday. Pull up last week's calendar and mark every planning meeting. Give each one a written purpose in the invite and a hard stop. Cut the length of the longest one in half. Keep your one-on-ones, they're the cheapest time you spend.

Then track one thing for two weeks: how many deals you moved on your lightest meeting days versus your heaviest.

Originally published by Nitish Patkar, Xeno Isenegger, Gideon Monterosa, Sebastiano Panichella and Norbert Seyff at ESEM 2026 (LIPIcs, Schloss Dagstuhl). Read the full study here: https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ESEM.2026.7