Four meetings, back to back. No gap between them, just the next call starting before the last one has properly ended. No lunch in the middle, no walk to the kitchen, nothing that counts as a break. Just the calendar, filled edge to edge.
This is common enough to have its own shorthand. People call it a meeting marathon, and most people who work at a desk have had one this month.
What a Full Calendar Actually Does
In 2021, Microsoft's Human Factors Lab ran a small, direct study on exactly this. Fourteen US-based remote information workers wore EEG caps through two versions of the same working day: one with four consecutive 30-minute meetings and no break, and one with the same four meetings spaced out by 10-minute gaps.
The finding: across two straight hours of back-to-back meetings, average activity in beta brain waves, the kind associated with stress, rose over time. With the 10-minute gaps in place, beta activity dropped after each one, and average stress-marker levels held steady across all four meetings instead of climbing. A second measure, frontal alpha asymmetry, told a similar story: positive in the break condition, which tracks with higher engagement, and negative without breaks, which tracks with withdrawal.
It's a small study. Fourteen people, all US-based, all already working remotely, and not a UK sample. It's also not about hydration, focus, or energy. It measured meetings and stress-marker brain activity, nothing else, and that's exactly as far as it should be read.
What It Doesn't Tell Us
It doesn't tell us that a drink fixes this. It doesn't tell us anything about cognition, focus, or what happens to attention over a meeting-heavy day. What it tells us, narrowly and specifically, is that an unbroken run of meetings and a run with small gaps in it aren't the same thing, at least on this one measure, in this one small group.
That's worth taking at face value rather than stretching further than it goes.
The Gap That Disappears
Away from the EEG data, there's a simpler, more familiar version of the same problem. A working day with natural gaps in it, between tasks, between a call and the next one, tends to have small rituals sitting inside those gaps without anyone deciding to put them there. A coffee gets made. A glass of water gets picked up on the way back from somewhere. A few minutes happen where nothing is scheduled.
A meeting marathon removes the gap, and the ritual that used to sit inside it doesn't automatically move somewhere else. It just doesn't happen. Nobody decides against making coffee or getting water during four back-to-back calls. There's simply no moment left where it would have happened by default.
Why 0800Labs Is Interested
This is the same territory as the working day's other unscheduled moments, looked at from a different angle: not a time of day, like the 3pm slump, and not a specific drink, like the third coffee, but the disappearance of the pause itself.
We call the occasion underneath all of this Workday Hydration. It's our own term, not an established category, and not a claim about what the Microsoft study found, or about what any drink does to stress, focus, or meetings. It names the moment we're interested in: the one that gets built for a desk day, on the days the calendar doesn't leave room for it on its own.
We're building something for that moment. If that's useful, the waitlist is below.