Time Drift
Are you like most of us, constantly looking at your calendar and asking, “How is it already Thursday?” The week seems to vanish into meetings, check-ins, and catch-ups. By the time you sit down to tackle the real work, the day and the week are already half gone.
As companies grow past ten employees, leaders begin to spend more of their week in coordination activities—meetings, check-ins, status updates, project reviews. Research shows executives now spend about 23 hours a week in meetings, up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s (Harvard Business Review, 2023).
Time drift is the gradual diversion of attention from productive work to managing the work. The symptoms are familiar: back-to-back meetings, scattered Slack threads, and the sense that by lunchtime the day’s energy has already been spent. No single meeting sinks a business, but the cumulative leak is costly.
Unlike crises that announce themselves in big numbers or major failures, time drift is subtle. It accumulates in five-minute delays, in tasks that take two meetings instead of one, in software log-ins that don’t connect the first try. These moments feel too small to matter, but their aggregate effect is decisive. The company feels like it is running harder to stay in the same place because, in truth, the available hours are eroding.
How Time Drift Shows Up
1. Meeting Creep. The most visible form of time drift is the steady expansion of meetings. What began as a quick weekly touchpoint becomes a standing ritual of multiple hours. Attendance grows “just in case,” and agendas stretch to cover what was missed last time. Meetings stack into a self-sustaining ecosystem, consuming the best hours of the week. By midweek, calendars are blocked wall to wall, leaving little room for concentrated work.
2. Leadership Interruption. Owners and executives experience time drift in its sharpest form: the fractured calendar. Instead of devoting long blocks to strategy, leaders are pulled into a chain of ad hoc requests—clarifications, approvals, quick judgments. Each feels urgent, but the cumulative effect is erosion. The leader’s schedule becomes a patchwork of firefighting, and long-term thinking is squeezed to the margins.
3. Hidden Queues. Perhaps the least visible driver of time drift is waiting. Work piles up in invisible queues while awaiting sign-offs, missing context, or forgotten follow-ups. Staff may be diligent, but projects stall not because of slow effort, but because of idle time. Unlike missed deadlines, queues are silent—they don’t announce themselves until momentum is already lost.
Why It Matters
Time drift reshapes the workweek from focused to fragmented. Staff report being constantly in motion but rarely effective. Leaders find that their best hours are consumed by coordination and interruptions rather than moving the business forward. Projects extend, not because tasks are complex, but because the available hours have been eaten away.
What makes time drift dangerous is not its size but its silence. It does not show up on financial statements or dashboards. It shows up in fatigue, in projects that stretch on, and in the creeping sense that the company is sprinting hard just to stay in place.
Naming the pattern is the first step to seeing it. Once visible, time drift explains why busy weeks yield so little progress. For small and medium businesses, recognizing time drift is not about reclaiming minutes—it is about regaining the clock itself.