Meetings are crucial to teamwork, but it’s all too easy to find your entire day consumed with them, with no time for the actual work assigned in those meetings. Avoid that problem by making one day a week in your calendar officially meeting-free.
Meetings picture from Shutterstock
Software development company Asana uses this approach with ‘No-Meetings Wednesdays’, a policy it based on an idea by management thinker Paul Graham. As Asana’s Dustin Moskovitz explained on Quora:
The gist is that makers suffer greatly from interrupts in their flow time. Managers are generally used to having a schedule-driven day, so it’s easy for them to throw a disruption into somebody else’s calendar. Makers also do this to each other. And unlike many companies, at Asana we generally want our managers to be makers some of the time as well, so they need a structure that ensures they get some flow time too.
While there might be odd exceptions (such as job interview candidates), keeping a day meeting-free as often as possible can definitely pay dividends.
Quora [via Business Insider]
Comments
One response to “Set A No-Meeting Day To Maximise Productivity”
My CEO does this. She loves it.
We tend to have only one day (Wednesdays) where there are meetings! Ok, that’s for the regulary ones, and there can be occasional irregular meetings scheduled for other days too, but they aren’t that frequent.
We also have one day a week working at home, and most people on my project do that on a Thursday – so no meetings are scheduled for Thursdays because most of the team won’t be in the office.