Most people, when asked where they go to get important work done, don’t say “the office.” They say the kitchen table at 6 a.m., a coffee shop, the back porch, a library, or simply “at home.” The office, the one place specifically designed for work, is often the last place people can actually do it. Jason Fried, co-founder of Basecamp, popularized this idea and pinpointed two culprits he calls “M&Ms”: managers and meetings.
The M&M Problem
Meetings and managers are the greatest causes of work not getting done at the office, as Fried puts it. Not email. Not social media. Not laziness. The very structures companies build to coordinate work end up preventing it.
Meetings are the bigger offender. When they become the default tool for every discussion, debate, and decision, they stop being productive and start being a tax on everyone’s time. Pulling seven people into a one-hour meeting doesn’t cost one hour. It costs seven. And the damage goes beyond that hour, because each person was pulled away from something they were already focused on. Whatever momentum they had is gone.
Managers compound the problem because they’re typically the ones calling those meetings and checking in throughout the day. Constantly asking people what they’re working on prevents them from actually doing the work they’re describing. Every status check, every shoulder tap, every “quick question” forces someone to context-switch. And since managers often spend their days moving between conversations rather than doing deep focused work themselves, they can underestimate how disruptive each interruption really is.
What Interruptions Actually Cost
The real price of a distraction isn’t the 30 seconds it takes to answer a question. It’s the recovery time afterward. Research at the University of California at Irvine found that it takes around 23 minutes, on average, for a worker to fully refocus after an interruption. That means a five-minute conversation about a project update doesn’t cost five minutes. It costs closer to 28. Three of those in a morning and you’ve lost half your productive hours before lunch.
This is why so many people describe their workday as getting things done “before everyone else arrives” or “after everyone leaves.” The hours between 9 and 5 become a gauntlet of interruptions with small pockets of real work squeezed in between. People aren’t unproductive. They’re just never given a long enough stretch of unbroken time to produce their best work.
Open Offices Make It Worse
The shift toward open-plan offices over the past two decades was supposed to encourage collaboration. In practice, it mostly increased unwanted interruptions. Research published in the journal Buildings examined how office layout affects distraction. Workers in offices shared with more than eight people reported the highest frequency of unwanted interruptions and showed the strongest negative relationship between those interruptions and their productivity. In other words, the more people around you, the harder it is to concentrate, and the more your output drops.
Interestingly, solo offices produced better productivity scores than any shared arrangement, even though workers in two-person offices reported slightly fewer interruptions. Having control over your environment, being able to close a door or simply not hear six simultaneous conversations, matters more than the raw number of disruptions. The ability to choose when you engage with others, rather than having it forced on you by proximity, is a major factor in whether work actually gets done.
Work Needs Long Stretches, Not Fragments
Creative and analytical work, the kind most knowledge workers are paid to do, requires what psychologists call “flow state.” You can’t write a proposal, debug code, design a campaign, or analyze data in 15-minute increments any more than you can get a good night’s sleep in 15-minute naps. The office chops the day into fragments. A meeting at 10, another at 11:30, a lunch thing at noon, a check-in at 2. What’s left between those blocks is rarely enough to sink into anything meaningful.
Compare that to a day working from home or arriving at the office before anyone else. Three or four uninterrupted hours in a row can produce more meaningful output than an entire fragmented day. That’s not because people work harder in those stretches. It’s because they can actually think.
How Teams Fix This
The solution isn’t eliminating all communication. It’s shifting from synchronous interruptions (meetings, taps on the shoulder, real-time chat expectations) to asynchronous communication, where people share information on their own schedule and others respond when it makes sense for their workflow.
A product manager with an idea for a new feature, for example, can record a short video walkthrough instead of pulling five people into a conference room. Teammates watch it when they have a natural break, leave comments at specific timestamps, and the discussion unfolds without anyone losing a morning to a meeting. The same idea gets discussed, debated, and refined, just without requiring everyone to be in the same room at the same time.
Some teams go further by establishing “no meeting” days, where one or two days per week are completely free of scheduled interruptions. Others set core collaboration hours (say, 1 to 3 p.m.) and protect the rest of the day for focused work. The common thread is treating people’s attention as a finite, valuable resource rather than something that’s always available on demand.
Rethinking What Offices Are For
None of this means offices are useless. Some work genuinely benefits from being in the same room: brainstorming sessions, relationship building, onboarding new team members, resolving a complex conflict. The problem is when every type of work gets treated the same way. Writing a report and planning a team retreat require completely different environments, but most offices force them into the same noisy, interruption-heavy space.
The most productive organizations recognize that work happens in two modes. Collaborative work needs proximity and conversation. Focused work needs quiet and long unbroken stretches. When the office only supports the first mode and actively undermines the second, people find workarounds: early mornings, late nights, working from home, noise-canceling headphones as a “do not disturb” sign. The question isn’t whether people are motivated enough to work. It’s whether the workplace is designed to let them.