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That's a weird bit of reckoning at the end. If you're short an hour of work, an hour of work is all you need to catch up.

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I don't think the reckoning is weird at all. Being interrupted for an hour in the middle of your work costs more than an hour in all but the most ideal cases.

If you could somehow save your brain state in an instant, teleport directly to the meeting for an hour, teleport back, and then reload your previous brain state as you returned to your work, it would take exactly an hour to catch up.

The fact is, it takes a bit of time to change gears for the meeting and then quite a bit more time to get back in the creative zone. Aside from just remembering all the details of what you were working on, it takes quite a bit of time for your body, including your brain, to get into a state of "flow".

Tell it. In intensely focus-based knowledge work, the economics of human task switching - to borrow Joel Spolsky's term - is a formidable and intriguing science that managers who look at time as an interchangeable commodity or a cluster of cells on a spreadsheet simply don't grasp.

I think he is trying to imply you cannot catch up. Doing that lost hours work consumes another hour and so on. The only way to catch up is to extend your working day by an hour.

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