Focused Time Saves Nine: Evaluating Computer-Assisted Protected Time for Hybrid Information Work
[PARTIAL. NOT A PEER-REVIEWED STUDY: a management-magazine article. THE OPENING AND THE FULL METHOD PARAGRAPH READ AT SOURCE at sloanreview.mit.edu; THE ARTICLE IS PAYWALLED AFTER THE METHOD SECTION AND THE RESULTS TABLE WAS NOT READ. The accepted-version PDFs at the University of Reading repository, centaur.reading.ac.uk items 102394 and 102437, COULD NOT BE READ: the repository served a bot challenge and returned 'Access Denied: error code 9e4edb5b6b850c41' on both attempts. The item carries no DOI, so this entry is keyed on first author and year] Laker, B., Pereira, V., Budhwar, P., & Malik, A. (2022). 'The Surprising Impact of Meeting-Free Days.' MIT Sloan Management Review, reprint 63320. WHAT IS VERIFIED FROM THE ARTICLE'S OWN TEXT, VERBATIM: 'We recently surveyed 76 companies, with more than 1,000 employees each and operations in more than 50 countries, that had introduced from one to five no-meeting days per week (prohibiting even one-on-one meetings) during the past 12 months. In addition, we spoke with managers and each company's HR director ...; examined data comparing employee stress levels before and after a reduction in meetings; and assessed the subsequent impact on productivity, collaboration, and engagement, using pulse surveys.' Adoption, verbatim: 'Nearly half (47%) of the companies we studied reduced meetings by 40% by introducing two no-meeting days per week. ... 35% instituted three no-meeting days, and 11% implemented four. The remaining 7% eradicated meetings entirely.' And the causal language on the page: 'autonomy, communication, engagement, and satisfaction all improved, resulting in decreased micromanagement and stress, which caused productivity to rise.' IT IS A CROSS-SECTIONAL SURVEY OF SELF-SELECTED ADOPTERS WITH PRODUCTIVITY CAPTURED BY PULSE SURVEY, WITH NO COMPARISON GROUP, AND IT IS NOT A QUASI-EXPERIMENT. THE CIRCULATED PRODUCTIVITY-INCREASE FIGURES FROM THE PAYWALLED RESULTS TABLE ARE DELIBERATELY NOT REPRODUCED IN THIS ENTRY: they were not read at source, the two repository copies were bot-blocked, and the vault's rule is that they must either be attributed to a secondary summary or left out, so they are left out. Note also that the work is laundered onward with a Harvard Business Review attribution in at least one place found in searching, and the publication is MIT Sloan Management Review. PAIRED WITH IT, AND THE BETTER SOURCE ON THE SAME QUESTION, read IN FULL AT SOURCE and searched exhaustively but NOT PEER REVIEWED and published by a company that sells meeting software: Microsoft Research (2022), Microsoft New Future of Work Report 2022. Microsoft's own characterisation of Laker and colleagues, slide 28, verbatim: 'Laker et al. (2022) surveyed 76 companies employing more than 1,000 people across 50 countries about meeting-free days ... Participants reported perceptions of cooperation, autonomy, communication, cooperation, engagement, productivity, satisfaction, stress, and micromanaging.' MICROSOFT'S OWN SUMMARY SAYS PERCEPTIONS, IN THAT WORD, and attributes the productivity result to four meeting-free days rather than to the two-day arrangement most of the sample adopted. AND THE TRACE, slide 18, verbatim: 'Meeting free days can help individuals find time to do individual work and reduce the stress of meeting overload. Studies have shown on average 78% reduction in meeting volume and 22% increase in focused work on meeting free days (Houck 2021).' THAT PAIR OF NUMBERS DISSOLVES. The cited artefact exists and Microsoft cites it correctly: a session page on Microsoft Research's own site, 'Talk Series: Developer productivity', Microsoft Research Summit 2021, dated 19 October 2021, with Brian Houck's title given as Microsoft Productivity Engineer, and Houck is listed among the report's own authors. THE VIDEO ITSELF WAS NOT READ: the page states 'Video playback requires cookie consent', the player did not render, and there is no transcript. The page's own abstract is the whole of the published description and contains no numbers, verbatim in part: 'Microsoft Productivity Engineer Brian Houck will share a practitioner's perspective on how engineering teams across Azure are preparing for a hybrid future based on learnings from working remotely during COVID-19. Measuring developer productivity across multiple dimensions by using a mix of methods ...' No sample, no method beyond 'a mix of methods', the population is Microsoft's own staff, and the framing is explicitly a practitioner's perspective rather than a study. A reduction in meeting volume on days designated meeting-free is close to tautological, so the interesting figure is the increase in focused work and it has no definition attached. THAT 'FOCUSED WORK' IS MOST LIKELY A MICROSOFT 365 TELEMETRY CONSTRUCT IS THE VAULT'S OWN INFERENCE AND IS LABELLED AS ONE. WHERE WE STOPPED: at the Summit session page and the ICSE 2022 industry-track abstract for Houck's 'A Culture of Productivity', which is also a talk with an abstract only, no figures, no sample and no method, though it contains the question the figures would answer, verbatim: 'Can more days off actually result in more work getting done?' A named citation to a real artefact is not the same as a traceable number. ALSO NOT VERIFIED AND NOT FOR PRINT AS A FINDING, SO NOT REPRODUCED HERE: a company-level self-report claim about no-meeting days at one named technology company, which could not be verified at any primary source. AND THE STUDY THIS PAIR POINTS TO, ADDED ON THE VERIFICATION PASS AND READ IN FULL AT SOURCE SEPARATELY: Das Swain and colleagues (2023), 'Focused Time Saves Nine', Proceedings of CHI 2023, doi:10.1145/3544548.3581326, the only randomised controlled test of calendar-protected focus blocks located, whose performance measure is a self-report significant only within a ninety per cent confidence interval, estimate 1.265, t = 1.768, p = 0.081, and whose nearest thing to an output measure, daily engagement on coding and development, showed a non-significant reduction. Brian Houck is its third author.
[PARTIAL. NOT A PEER-REVIEWED STUDY: a management-magazine article. THE OPENING AND THE FULL METHOD PARAGRAPH READ AT SOURCE at sloanreview.mit.edu; THE ARTICLE IS PAYWALLED AFTER THE METHOD SECTION AND THE RESULTS TABLE WAS NOT READ. The accepted-version PDFs at the University of Reading repository, centaur.reading.ac.uk items 102394 and 102437, COULD NOT BE READ: the repository served a bot challenge and returned 'Access Denied: error code 9e4edb5b6b850c41' on both attempts. The item carries no DOI, so this entry is keyed on first author and year] Laker, B., Pereira, V., Budhwar, P., & Malik, A. (2022). 'The Surprising Impact of Meeting-Free Days.' MIT Sloan Management Review, reprint 63320. WHAT IS VERIFIED FROM THE ARTICLE'S OWN TEXT, VERBATIM: 'We recently surveyed 76 companies, with more than 1,000 employees each and operations in more than 50 countries, that had introduced from one to five no-meeting days per week (prohibiting even one-on-one meetings) during the past 12 months. In addition, we spoke with managers and each company's HR director ...; examined data comparing employee stress levels before and after a reduction in meetings; and assessed the subsequent impact on productivity, collaboration, and engagement, using pulse surveys.' Adoption, verbatim: 'Nearly half (47%) of the companies we studied reduced meetings by 40% by introducing two no-meeting days per week. ... 35% instituted three no-meeting days, and 11% implemented four. The remaining 7% eradicated meetings entirely.' And the causal language on the page: 'autonomy, communication, engagement, and satisfaction all improved, resulting in decreased micromanagement and stress, which caused productivity to rise.' IT IS A CROSS-SECTIONAL SURVEY OF SELF-SELECTED ADOPTERS WITH PRODUCTIVITY CAPTURED BY PULSE SURVEY, WITH NO COMPARISON GROUP, AND IT IS NOT A QUASI-EXPERIMENT. THE CIRCULATED PRODUCTIVITY-INCREASE FIGURES FROM THE PAYWALLED RESULTS TABLE ARE DELIBERATELY NOT REPRODUCED IN THIS ENTRY: they were not read at source, the two repository copies were bot-blocked, and the vault's rule is that they must either be attributed to a secondary summary or left out, so they are left out. Note also that the work is laundered onward with a Harvard Business Review attribution in at least one place found in searching, and the publication is MIT Sloan Management Review. PAIRED WITH IT, AND THE BETTER SOURCE ON THE SAME QUESTION, read IN FULL AT SOURCE and searched exhaustively but NOT PEER REVIEWED and published by a company that sells meeting software: Microsoft Research (2022), Microsoft New Future of Work Report 2022. Microsoft's own characterisation of Laker and colleagues, slide 28, verbatim: 'Laker et al. (2022) surveyed 76 companies employing more than 1,000 people across 50 countries about meeting-free days ... Participants reported perceptions of cooperation, autonomy, communication, cooperation, engagement, productivity, satisfaction, stress, and micromanaging.' MICROSOFT'S OWN SUMMARY SAYS PERCEPTIONS, IN THAT WORD, and attributes the productivity result to four meeting-free days rather than to the two-day arrangement most of the sample adopted. AND THE TRACE, slide 18, verbatim: 'Meeting free days can help individuals find time to do individual work and reduce the stress of meeting overload. Studies have shown on average 78% reduction in meeting volume and 22% increase in focused work on meeting free days (Houck 2021).' THAT PAIR OF NUMBERS DISSOLVES. The cited artefact exists and Microsoft cites it correctly: a session page on Microsoft Research's own site, 'Talk Series: Developer productivity', Microsoft Research Summit 2021, dated 19 October 2021, with Brian Houck's title given as Microsoft Productivity Engineer, and Houck is listed among the report's own authors. THE VIDEO ITSELF WAS NOT READ: the page states 'Video playback requires cookie consent', the player did not render, and there is no transcript. The page's own abstract is the whole of the published description and contains no numbers, verbatim in part: 'Microsoft Productivity Engineer Brian Houck will share a practitioner's perspective on how engineering teams across Azure are preparing for a hybrid future based on learnings from working remotely during COVID-19. Measuring developer productivity across multiple dimensions by using a mix of methods ...' No sample, no method beyond 'a mix of methods', the population is Microsoft's own staff, and the framing is explicitly a practitioner's perspective rather than a study. A reduction in meeting volume on days designated meeting-free is close to tautological, so the interesting figure is the increase in focused work and it has no definition attached. THAT 'FOCUSED WORK' IS MOST LIKELY A MICROSOFT 365 TELEMETRY CONSTRUCT IS THE VAULT'S OWN INFERENCE AND IS LABELLED AS ONE. WHERE WE STOPPED: at the Summit session page and the ICSE 2022 industry-track abstract for Houck's 'A Culture of Productivity', which is also a talk with an abstract only, no figures, no sample and no method, though it contains the question the figures would answer, verbatim: 'Can more days off actually result in more work getting done?' A named citation to a real artefact is not the same as a traceable number. ALSO NOT VERIFIED AND NOT FOR PRINT AS A FINDING, SO NOT REPRODUCED HERE: a company-level self-report claim about no-meeting days at one named technology company, which could not be verified at any primary source. AND THE STUDY THIS PAIR POINTS TO, ADDED ON THE VERIFICATION PASS AND READ IN FULL AT SOURCE SEPARATELY: Das Swain and colleagues (2023), 'Focused Time Saves Nine', Proceedings of CHI 2023, doi:10.1145/3544548.3581326, the only randomised controlled test of calendar-protected focus blocks located, whose performance measure is a self-report significant only within a ninety per cent confidence interval, estimate 1.265, t = 1.768, p = 0.081, and whose nearest thing to an output measure, daily engagement on coding and development, showed a non-significant reduction. Brian Houck is its third author.
Written from the pARTIAL. NOT A PEER-REVIEWED STUDY: a management-magazine article. THE OPENING AND THE FULL METHOD PARAGRAPH READ AT SOURCE at sloanreview.mit.edu; THE ARTICLE IS PAYWALLED AFTER THE METHOD SECTION AND THE RESULTS TABLE WAS NOT READ. The accepted-version PDFs at the University of Reading repository, centaur.reading.ac.uk items 102394 and 102437, COULD NOT BE READ: the repository served a bot challenge and returned 'Access Denied: error code 9e4edb5b6b850c41' on both attempts. The item carries no DOI, so this entry is keyed on first author and year.
What our sources record
Recorded when this source was checked, figures included, with page references and quotation marks removed.
Das Swain, V., Hernandez, J., Houck, B., Saha, K., Suh, J., Chaudhry, A., Cho, T., Guo, W., Iqbal, S. T., & Czerwinski, M. (2023). Focused Time Saves Nine: Evaluating Computer-Assisted Protected Time for Hybrid Information Work. Proceedings of CHI 2023. doi:10.1145/3544548.3581326