Meeting fragmentation

Meeting fragmentation describes the shape of a calendar, not just its total load. Two people can each have four hours of meetings in a day; one might have them grouped into a single morning block, leaving the afternoon largely free, while the other has them scattered across the whole day in thirty-minute slices, leaving no usable stretch of time at all.

Fragmented calendars are strongly associated with lower deep work availability and higher context-switching cost, because the gaps between meetings are usually too short to start anything demanding, and the mental overhead of preparing for and recovering from each meeting adds up.

Sloane measures fragmentation from calendar metadata, looking at gap length and distribution across the day, and compares this against a person's own recent pattern rather than an arbitrary threshold. A moderately fragmented day is normal for many roles; the signal that matters is a sustained increase against someone's own baseline.

Where fragmentation has risen and coincides with other signs of strain, Sloane's suggestions tend to be specific and small, such as identifying a meeting that could plausibly move to create one longer, usable block, rather than a general instruction to have fewer meetings.