The Enshittification of MS Teams: How Scheduling Meetings Became a Full-Time Job
Microsoft Teams and modern scheduling tools were supposed to make us faster. Instead, they've become a bloated mess of extra steps, toil, and burnout. Here's why enterprise software is breaking our brains. —
Remember when scheduling a meeting was as simple as saying, "See you at 2 PM"?
Today, thanks to the relentless march of enterprise software "innovation," that simple act has devolved into a multi-step battle against bloated interfaces, loading spinners, and confusing integrations. Welcome to the enshittification of Microsoft Teams and modern scheduling.
The term "enshittification" (coined by Cory Doctorow) usually describes consumer platforms that degrade over time as they squeeze users for profit. But the exact same phenomenon is happening in B2B software. Products that started as simple chat apps or calendars have morphed into inescapable, monolithic operating systems that demand constant feeding.
And it is burning us out.
The Meta-Work Nightmare
It’s rarely the actual work that causes burnout. It’s the meta-work—the exhausting, friction-filled tasks we have to complete just to be allowed to do our jobs.
Take MS Teams. What was once a straightforward communication tool is now a labyrinth. Want to schedule a quick sync with a colleague in another time zone?
- Open the app (wait for it to load its heavy Electron shell).
- Navigate to the Calendar tab (wait for it to sync).
- Click "New Meeting" and wait for the modal.
- Add attendees and open the Scheduling Assistant.
- Stare at a confusing grid of gray and purple blocks, trying to mentally calculate if 4 PM CET is too late for your developer in London, while the app aggressively suggests "Focus Time" blocks.
- Send the invite, only to realize Teams automatically added a redundant video link when you just wanted a phone call.
Every extra click, every second of latency, and every confusing UI change is a tiny papercut to your cognitive load. This is toil—work that is manual, repetitive, and scales linearly with your team size.
The Illusion of "Productivity" Features
Microsoft and other enterprise giants keep adding features to "help" us. We get AI meeting summaries, virtual whiteboards, integrated SharePoint files, and status indicators that track our every mouse movement.
But these features don't reduce friction; they add overhead. When a tool tries to be everything to everyone, it becomes terrible at its core function. Scheduling a simple cross-border meeting shouldn't require a Ph.D. in Microsoft 365 administration. The cognitive overhead of navigating these bloated ecosystems drains our energy before the meeting even begins.
The Cure: Ruthless Simplicity
We don't need more features. We need less friction.
When you're working with a distributed, global team, the only thing that actually matters for scheduling is: When are we both awake and working?
You don't need a heavy, slow-loading enterprise behemoth to answer that question. You just need visibility.
This is why we built Timezoners. It doesn't try to manage your files, summarize your calls with AI, or track your "Focus Time." It does one thing perfectly: it gives you a simple, instant visual board of your team's local times and working hours.
No loading spinners. No scheduling assistants buried in five sub-menus. Just a clean visual overlap of when everyone is available.
It’s time to reject the enshittification of our daily tools. Stop letting bloated software dictate your workflow, cut out the meta-work, and get back to actually doing your job.