The tax you pay between meetings

Your calendar lies to you. It says the 10:00 ends at 10:30 and the next one starts clean. It doesn't. Some part of your head is still in the 10:00 while the 10:30 is already talking, and the cost of dragging yourself from one to the other is real, even though no one ever wrote it down anywhere.

I notice it most on the days that look most efficient. Fifteen meetings, no gaps, a calendar packed so tight it looks like an achievement. By two in the afternoon I'm not tired from the meetings. I'm tired from the switching. Each new room asks me to drop everything I was holding and pick up a completely different set of people, history, and stakes, and I do that fifteen times, and the dropping and picking up is the part that wears the groove in you.

Think of it like a chef on a busy pass. The cooking isn't what breaks them. It's the order that says one of everything, all different, all at once. Every ticket pulls them to a different station, and the walk between stations, done five hundred times a night, is where the exhaustion lives. The work was never the problem. The constant re-aiming was.

And the switch costs you twice. There's the obvious bit, the dead minutes at the start of a meeting while you reload who and what and why. But there's a quieter cost too, the residue that sticks: you walk into the 11:00 still half-thinking about the 10:30, so the 11:00 gets a worse version of you. You're never fully in the room you're actually in. Multiply a slightly worse version of you across fifteen rooms and the day adds up to a lot less than it should.

The usual advice is to switch less. Batch your meetings, protect deep-work blocks, say no more often. It's good advice and I follow it where I can. But I can't no my way out of fifteen meetings, and most senior people can't either. The switching isn't a bad habit we can drop. For a lot of us it is the job.

So the question I care about isn't how to switch less. It's how to make each switch cheaper. If the dead minutes at the top of a meeting are spent reloading context, then the fix is to have the context already loaded when you sit down. Not a transcript to read, that's homework. The specific handful of things that matter for this room: who's here, what we decided last time, what's still open. Hand me that as I walk in and the tax mostly disappears.

That's the job I want a tool to do. Not help me capture more, not help me switch less, just make the switch I'm going to make anyway cost me almost nothing. Pay the tax for me. That's what a context assistant is for.