Circle Back Next Week: The Effect of Meeting-Free Weeks on Distributed Workers’ Unstructured Time and Attention Negotiation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While distributed workers rely on scheduled meetings for coordination and collaboration, these meetings can also challenge their ability to focus. Protecting worker focus has been addressed from a technical perspective, but companies are now attempting organizational interventions, such as meeting-free weeks. Recognizing distributed collaboration as a sociotechnical challenge, we first present an interview study with distributed workers participating in meeting-free weeks at an enterprise software company. We identify three orientations workers exhibit during these weeks: Focus, Collaborative, and Time-Bound, each with varying levels and use of unstructured time. These different orientations result in challenges in attention negotiation, which may be suited for technical interventions. This motivated a follow-up study investigating attention negotiation and the compensating mechanisms workers developed during meeting-free weeks. Our framework identified tensions between the attention-getting and attention-delegation strategies. We extend past work to show how workers adapt their virtual collaboration mechanisms in response to organizational interventions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".