Meeting recovery blocks: the calendar change that gave back 6 hours weekly

I audited a brutal week: twenty three meetings, zero breaks longer than eleven minutes. The problem was not the meetings. It was the recovery. After every call your brain needs transition time, and back-to-back scheduling pretends it does not. The fix: fifteen minute buffers after every meeting, automatically. Yes, the calendar looks less efficient. It is not. Those buffers hold notes, decompression, and the thirty seconds of thinking that prevents the wrong yes. Six hours of recovered focus weekly from a settings change. Your calendar is not a scoreboard of importance. It is a battery management system. Schedule like the energy budget is real, because it is.