91% of People Mentally Check Out in Meetings (Here’s the Fix)

Learn how a four-colour system instantly aligns focus and boosts collaboration

In 1788, the Austrian army was positioned along the Danube, preparing for conflict with Ottoman forces.

A cavalry unit sent to scout ahead encountered locals selling schnapps. The soldiers purchased and drank the alcohol. Later that night, another Austrian infantry unit crossed the river.

Someone shouted "Turks!" The drunken cavalry, mistaking their fellow soldiers for the enemy, fired shots.

Confusion spread like wildfire. Commands were shouted in multiple languages. In the darkness, the Austrian army began firing on itself in escalating waves of chaos.

By morning, over 10,000 Austrian soldiers were dead or wounded. The Ottoman forces hadn't even arrived.[1]

This military disaster, known as the Battle of Karánsebes, happened because different parts of the same team had fundamentally different understandings of the situation.

Your meetings may not end in bloodshed, but they're suffering from the same disease: misaligned mental states that waste time, kill productivity, and slowly bleed your company's potential. Today, I'll show you a simple colour-coding system that aligns everyone's mental focus instantly. It’ll save your team from its own costly internal battles.

Let's dive in:

The Meeting Problem by the Numbers

According to Atlassian's research on workplace productivity[2]:

• The average professional attends 62 meetings per month

• 31 hours per month are spent in unproductive meetings

• 47% of employees consider meetings the #1 time-waster at work

• 91% admit to daydreaming during meetings

• 72% of people say meetings are ineffective

• 45% feel overwhelmed by the number of meetings they attend

Why such waste? Because when people enter a collaboration space in different mental states:

Person A shows up ready to brainstorm wild new possibilities. Person B arrives prepared to make firm decisions with existing information. Person C is half-present, attempting to multitask through emails. Person D thinks it's primarily a relationship-building opportunity.

Their brains are literally operating in different physiological states—using different neural networks, activating different regions of the prefrontal cortex, and running on different neurochemical cocktails.

It's like five musicians playing different songs simultaneously and wondering why it doesn't sound good.

Colour-Coded Brain States

What if I told you the solution was as simple as four colours?

Imagine walking into a meeting room and seeing a purple card on the door. Or opening a calendar invite with a red dot in the subject line. Or joining a Slack channel with a green prefix.

In an instant, before a single word is spoken, everyone knows exactly what mental state to bring: