Certainly feels like one when I know the context switch is coming and it's scheduled in such a mid morning or mid afternoon slot that the time either side of it isn't long enough to do deep work, particularly when the rest of the team will interrupt me ad hoc to get unblocked on their work. If there were no meeting I can deal with their interruptions and context switch back to my work and get a long enough stretch to concentrate. With frequent meetings in certain timeslots I get virtually nothing done some weeks.

It likely affects some people more than others depending on the demands placed on you.

Think I'm going request meetings never fall mid morning or mid afternoon.

Personally my least favorite time for a meeting is one that interrupts my usual lunch. They should put you on trial at the Hague for scheduling a meeting from 11:00-1:00.

Yeah I don't want lunch interrupted either. But from 11:00 to 12:00. Or preferably 11:30 to 12:00. Or even 4pm to 5pm.

> If the meeting is on a calendar ahead of time it's not really an interruption.

Knowing about it doesn’t make it interrupt flow any less, unless you just avoid the kind of work that would require flow around it, which still imposes the same kind of productivity impact on intellectual “making” workers. [0]

[0] related: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

I don’t know about you guys, but I can’t really keep a sustained bust going for 8 hours anyway. Even if I had no meetings at all, I have to stop for the restroom, tea, food, or even just to give my body a break.

IME, non-intellectual breaks don't break flow the same way as meetings where you need to use, but shift, intellectual focus. Bathroom, short-walk, and coffee/tea/snack breaks, aside from filling important bodily functions that don’t get filled by meetings, provide a pause that seems somewhat akin to a rest between sets in physical exercise.

It’s an interruption from the task you were working on. Being planned or on a calendar means it’s not an ‘unplanned interruption’, however, anything that takes you away from what you’re doing is, by definition, an interruption.

In some ways it's worse because you will start anticipating the meeting before it starts.

I don’t know how you work, but my schedule of meeting, work, meeting, work definitely feels like the meetings are interruptions.

Especially since they don’t add any value, but that’s arguably a different problem.

Great idea! Now I just need to get people to schedule their Slack messages a week in advance.