A meeting can end on time while sending hours of unclear work into everyone else’s afternoon.

Ending on schedule measures only the meeting, not what the meeting produced. A discussion can close neatly and still leave eight people uncertain about who is doing what, and that uncertainty turns into messages, guesses and duplicated effort for the rest of the day. The cost does not appear in the calendar, so it rarely gets counted. Punctuality is easy to see; clarity has to be checked for deliberately.

Before your next discussion ends, spend the last two minutes saying aloud who is doing what and by when. If nobody can answer that, the extra five minutes now will cost less than the afternoon will.