Typing Faster Isn’t Enough: The Hidden Cost of Scheduling Meetings
We put real effort into working faster. But how much time do we lose simply trying to work together?
Productivity is usually measured individually: how quickly we finish a task, how accurately we communicate, how smoothly we move from one activity to the next. Typing is a good example. Better speed and accuracy save time, reduce frustration, and make everyday digital work feel more natural.
Yet there is a curious paradox. We can become remarkably efficient at individual tasks while still losing time to something much simpler: agreeing when to meet. And unlike individual inefficiency, this hidden cost of poor coordination is shared by everyone involved.
The invisible cost of arranging a meeting
Consider a familiar situation. Someone needs to bring six colleagues together and proposes three possible dates by email.
Two people can make Monday, three can make Tuesday, two others prefer Thursday. Someone suggests Friday instead. One person hasn’t replied. A follow-up goes out, then several more responses. Eventually, a time emerges.
Nobody did anything wrong. Everyone was helpful. But the simple act of agreeing on a time has drawn on the attention of an entire group — and each message is also an interruption, pulling people away from the work the meeting was meant to advance.
Individual productivity versus collective efficiency
At TypingMetrics, we focus on one small but fundamental part of digital work: helping people observe and improve their typing speed, accuracy, and consistency. The premise is simple — small improvements in frequently repeated activities add up over time.
But there is a broader lesson. Productivity is not only about how efficiently each person works. It is also about how well their work fits together.
- Someone saves five minutes drafting an email, then loses fifteen in a thread about availability.
- A team of highly productive individuals still stalls when coordination adds friction.
The challenge is not always to work faster. Sometimes it is to remove work that never needed to happen.
What simple coordination looks like
We have sophisticated tools for communication, project management, and calendars. Yet finding a common meeting time often remains surprisingly cumbersome. Ideally, it needs only three steps:
- One person proposes a few possible times.
- Participants mark which options work for them.
- The organiser picks the time that suits the group best.
When those answers are gathered in one place, most of the back-and-forth disappears. The benefit is not only convenience for the organiser: everyone spends less time reading, replying, checking, and reconciling separate messages. And because answering is easy, people tend to answer sooner.
A practical example: Time Ballot
This is the thinking behind Time Ballot, a free tool for scheduling group meetings.
Instead of an email chain, the organiser proposes a few times and shares a single link. Participants mark what works for them, and the best option becomes visible at a glance. There is no account to create, no tracking, and the service is hosted in Switzerland.
Its purpose is deliberately modest: remove a little unnecessary friction from something most of us do every week. There is no methodology to learn and no need to change how a team works — just a simpler way to agree on a time.
Disclosure: Time Ballot is made by the same people who make TypingMetrics.
Better meetings begin before they start
Of course, scheduling a meeting efficiently doesn’t make it worthwhile. A well-organised meeting without a clear purpose still costs everyone their time.
Before arranging one, it is worth asking whether a short message, a shared document, or an asynchronous discussion would do. When a meeting is the right tool, the effort to bring people together should be as light as possible — especially across organisations, locations, and time zones, where nobody can see anyone else’s calendar.
The aim is not to arrange more meetings. It is to spend less effort arranging the ones that matter.
Time is a finite resource too
Sustainability is usually discussed in terms of energy, materials, and transport. But time and attention are finite as well. Every unnecessary administrative exchange has an opportunity cost: time that could have gone into learning, creating, solving problems — or simply living.
Using time well is not a sustainability strategy on its own. But it belongs to the same mindset: avoid needless waste, and design systems that respect the resources available.
Small improvements, multiplied
Better typing and better scheduling share the same principle. Neither requires a dramatic change in how we work.
- Typing accurately removes unnecessary corrections.
- Scheduling simply removes unnecessary exchanges.
Both address small sources of friction in things we repeat constantly — and when the improvement is shared across a group, its value extends well beyond the original task.
Typing faster isn’t enough on its own. Perhaps the most meaningful measure of productivity isn’t how much faster we can work, but how much unnecessary work we can avoid.