The Hidden Cost Of A Broken Calendar: Why Time Poverty Is A Leadership Problem

Forbes

3 days ago

A vice is tightly pressing an antique pocket watch. Concept of being busy.
A technician checks her schedule on Sunday night. Her shift changed. Again. Her child's care, her commute, her second job, her time—reshuffled in a moment. Meanwhile, her company proudly touts its flexible culture.
We say we value empathy and autonomy. But the calendar tells another story. If you want to understand performance, start with the calendar. Not the strategy calendar. The real one. The lived one. The one packed with 7:30s that shouldn't be meetings, shifts that change overnight, deadlines that move faster than thinking, and breaks that disappear before they begin.
That calendar tells you what your culture actually values. Behind every disconnected employee, every frustrated customer, there's a work schedule in the background. One that may look fine on paper but feels brutal in practice. Hours that collide. Meetings that sprawl. Shifts that keep changing. And a quiet expectation that people will just adjust.
And the pace is intense— though not always productive or efficient. A Microsoft study showed that employees are averaging 6.6 hours of overtime each week, attending 29.6% more meetings than they would like to, and are experiencing an average of 4.7 cancelled and rescheduled meetings per week.
It's easy to blame burnout on individuals. It's harder to admit that many of our time structures are broken by design.
The Data Behind The Feeling
A new study titled the American Job Quality Study by Jobs for the Future, The Families & Workers Fund, W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, and Gallup puts numbers to what many already feel. Only 35% of U.S. workers have a high-quality schedule—one that's predictable, stable, and includes some degree of control.
The rest?
About one in four face schedule unpredictability. Another one in four deal with unstable weekly hours. And nearly four in ten have little or no say in how their time gets structured.
The definition in the study is simple: A high-quality schedule means you know your hours at least two weeks in advance, your weekly time doesn't swing wildly unless you want it to, and you have input into key details—like how much you work, when you work, or when you can step away.
Take those things away and what's left isn't flexibility.
It's volatility, hidden under a culture of availability.
The study also found that one in three part-time workers without a college degree has a low-quality schedule. These are often the same workers who run retail floors, power essential services, and interact with customers every day. When their time gets broken, so does everything else.
Time Poverty Is Structural
This isn't just about poor planning. It's time poverty, a chronic lack of usable, discretionary time. Not just how many hours someone works, but how much of that time they actually own.
The traditional definition—used by economists and development agencies—describes time poverty as working more than 12 hours a day, including unpaid labor, leaving little room for rest or care. That framing still matters, especially in contexts of gender and labor equity.
But it no longer captures the full picture.
In today's world, time poverty shows up in more ways than it used to. For some, it's unpredictable shifts, last-minute schedule changes, or constant reshuffling of personal responsibilities. For others, it's back-to-back meetings, nonstop notifications, and the pressure to always be available.
Whether you're chasing hours or running out of them, the result is the same—no rhythm, no margin, no time you can really call your own.
This isn't just about overwork. It's about the fragmentation of time. The erosion of control. The slow disappearance of depth, recovery, and anything that feels truly uninterrupted.
You can be time-poor with a demanding hourly job.
You can be time-poor with a high-paying desk job.
It's not about class or title. It's about coherence.
And more of us are losing it.
The American Job Quality Study findings reflect this. Workers with low-quality schedules are more than twice as likely to say their job regularly interferes with their personal lives. Fifty-seven percent say that disruption happens often. Those with high-quality schedules are much more likely to say the opposite—that their job rarely intrudes.
Scheduling Quality Insights
Time Equity Begins With The Schedule
Companies often point to flexibility as a solution. But flexibility without control is just chaos in softer language.
Whether you're at your desk in an office, on a factory floor, behind a counter, or out in the field, if your hours are constantly shifting, you're not in control. If learning is encouraged but never protected, it's performative. If your schedule can be changed at any time, your autonomy is an illusion. These aren't isolated problems. They are structural ones, and they cut across roles, industries, and titles.
This is where the leadership gap shows up. Well-being is endorsed but never scheduled. Growth is discussed but rarely resourced. Reflection is admired but squeezed between meetings.
We ask people to give more, do more, grow more, without first giving them time they can trust.
Rhythm Over Routine
Routine is easy to fill. Rhythm is harder to build. But it's rhythm that sustains performance.
Unstable schedules break attention. Overfilled calendars break presence. Unpredictability breaks trust. You can't learn when you're bracing for change. You can't lead when your day is always reactive. And you are stretched in all directions.
Rhythm isn't about predictability for predictability's sake. It's about giving people something solid to build their energy, their focus, and their future around.
The Leadership Responsibility
This isn't a workforce issue. It's a leadership one.
Work doesn't begin with the annual plan. It begins with the hour. Because how time is structured is how value is signaled.
What does it feel like to live inside a workweek here?
Who controls their time?
Who's always adjusting?
Who gets space to think and breathe?
And who always gets the leftover slots?
We talk about equity in many forms—pay, promotion, opportunity. But time equity may be the most foundational of all. It determines what's possible before anything else can.
The Infrastructure Of Trust
Leaders often chase transformation by aiming big. But culture shifts through smaller decisions—calendar invites, meeting rhythms, margin for rest and depth.
A high-quality schedule is the infrastructure of trust. It shows that leadership understands time isn't a neutral resource. It's an emotional one. A structural one. A human one.
Work isn't just what gets done. It's how time gets lived. And when time is owned, protected, and shared with intention, the rest of performance follows.