As a global manager, my week is full of meetings. Many are one-off customer meetings or presentations, but my calendar also includes nine hours through the week that are for standing weekly internal meetings. A few months ago, these were spread out and broke up my days so that I could rarely get a two-hour block of time for any productive work.Some time ago I made an effort to reschedule all those standing meetings to what I used to call "Tuesday". I was able to juggle all but 2 of them into a single day that is now a very full back-to-back meeting day, but it leaves large open spaces for the rest of my week. MeetingDay (AKA "Tuesday") is now pretty intense, but there is huge value in freeing up time on the other days so it is very much worth the effort.
So why did I do this? Why force myself to endure a full day of back-to-back meetings? It's all about trade-offs. If I cram all my meetings into a single (intense grueling) day, I free up the rest of my week to block off large chunks of time for uninterrupted research, development, and potentially - golf.
There has been a great deal of research done on the effects of work-interruption on productivity. Similar studies have been done on the effects of task switching. Meetings, both planned and unplanned, are the most common workplace interruptions. The average person today is task-switching every 10 to 12 minutes and meetings that break up the day make that worse. In order to get anything productive accomplished, you need to be able to block off 2 hour to 4 hours blocks of uninterrupted work. You cannot do that if you need to be interrupted halfway though it for a budget meeting or regional status update.
It took some work to wrestle them all into a single day, and it is not complete, but this is a much cleaner schedule than I had before. I have the ability now to block off 4 hours on a Thursday for development work where I can turn off my phone, shut down Slack and just focus, knowing that any important meetings have been taken care of on MeetingDay.
You may be shocked and amazed to know this is not an original idea. I actually stole this from a customer, who stole this from someone else, but it is efficient, and it works and hopefully, the idea can help you too.
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