📅 No more meetings…
Hey there 👋🏼
After reading a lot about the topic, and trying to consolidate my daily schedule to maximize focus zones, I've committed to free up one of my days.
Operationally, I've done the following:
Move all the meetings that I control to other days of the week.
Create a day-long slot asking people not to book meetings.
For meetings that are booked on Wednesdays ask the owner if I'm optional or required, or if the meeting can be moved to one of the other days of the week.
First, let me share that contrary to what I thought, my colleagues are really supportive and very rarely have meetings been booked on Wednesdays.
Now... I'm sure you're wondering... What am I doing on Wednesdays if not attending meetings left and right?
It's quite simple actually. I now know that I have a full day's worth of time to block and schedule as I see fit. This means that I can tackle tasks that take more than the 30/45 minutes I had before in-between meetings. I can now block 90 minutes to focus on a project.
But this freedom doesn't come without any pain. Right now I'm witnessing an overload of meetings on the remaining days. My energy gets fully drained, especially on Mondays and Tuesdays, but so far the price is worth paying.
Let me share with you an evolution of this thought.
HBR published interesting research on companies that reduced their meetings from 20% to 100% - no meetings at all.
The experience evaluated several topics like:
Autonomy
Communication
Cooperation
Engagement
Micromanaging
Productivity
Satisfaction
Stress
As companies start reducing their meetings the scores ramp up a lot until they plateau around a 60% reduction. This translates into an 83% improvement in team autonomy and a 68% reduction in micromanaging. According to the team stress levels were reduced by 57%.
It's interesting that from a 60% and an 80% reduction the numbers are very similar showing a plateau in results.
However, to me, it was quite curious to see that teams didn't react well to companies that abolished completely meetings. Team satisfaction was lower in meeting free companies.
In a nutshell, the top 3 techniques to reduce your meetings are:
Be selective in the meetings you create and the ones you accept
Move your dailies into async mode
Prioritise async work
If you want to read further on this topic, check this really good article on HBR - "Dear Manager, You’re Holding Too Many Meetings".
That's it from me. I hope you have a fantastic weekend, and that this issue challenges you to start questioning the meetings in your schedule next week.
⏱TL;DR
Create a meeting-free day
It will overload the remaining week but will allow you to do work you couldn't before
Be extremely critical in the meetings you attend and create
Move into an async approach first
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Have an incredible week! 💪🏼
Parada 👊🏼
A Leader's Mindset