You can save half a day per week with these 3 tips

No one has ever done this:

You get a new job.

It’s your dream company.

You walk in the door, throw a fist pump and maybe even a little pelvic thrust and shout:

“Yes! I can’t wait to sit in meetings. This is awesome!”

Meetings are the worst. I hate meetings.

It’s ironic, because more than anyone in our company, I spend my day in meetings.

It’s the nature of leadership roles, mine in particular—I’m meeting with investors, clients, vendors, attorneys, and so forth. The worst part of meetings is getting a group of people together to committee a decision often turns into tabling the decision altogether. Committee-led decision making is crippling for an organization, leading to advertising godfather, David Ogilvy, to say “you can tour all of the great parks in America, and you’ll find no statues of committees.”

While I loathe meetings, I signed up for this as a leader. I’m the decision maker who helps us avoid the debate-until-we-die scenario with decisive action.

It’s critical to remember it’s not what my team signed up for, though.

Over the years, I’ve come up with three very simple ways I block out meetings for me and my team. They’re so simple they seem obvious, yet hardly anyone I know does it.

Let’s talk about calendar etiquette.

Dangers of overbooking

Virtual meetings and digital calendars have maximized “productivity,” and therefore killed it. It’s now possible to be in five or six meetings before lunch without ever leaving your desk. I’ve always found this to be exhausting and have combated it for myself and the team.

Finally, I have the science to prove it.

About the research: Microsoft’s Human Factors Lab used EEG caps to measure beta wave activity—associated with stress—in the brains of meeting participants. For those given breaks, their average beta wave activity remained largely steady over time; the “coolness” of their stress levels is visualized here in blues and greens. For those deprived of breaks, their average beta wave activity rose as time passed, suggesting a buildup of stress; that increase is depicted here with colors shifting from cool to hot. The chart represents the relative difference in beta activity between break and no-break conditions at the top of each meeting (averaged across the 14 research participants).

Microsoft did a study on the human brain during meetings. Some folks were given a good amount of breaks in between meetings, while another group pushed on through meeting after meeting (as most of us do).

When participants had meditation breaks, brainwave patterns “showed positive levels of frontal alpha asymmetry,” or in other words, they were much more engaged. Without breaks, the levels were negative, suggesting the participants were withdrawn, or less engaged in the meeting.

The study showed that when the brain is experiencing stress, it’s harder to stay focused and engaged. The breaks were not only good for wellbeing—they improved the team’s ability to do better work.

Now think about the impacts of this playing out every day for 250+ work days per year.

The power of the DNS

I used to work for a company that every now and then would put “Groove Time” on the calendar. It was a companywide meeting and it meant you could not schedule a meeting with anyone during a Groove Time slot—that was a time for productivity, not meetings.

I revived this concept at my next agency. I started putting time blocks on my calendar for work, but the problem was if the accounts team wanted to book a client meeting, they would book over my personal work time because “clients come first.”

In quiet retaliation, I started making up fake client names and putting them on my calendar, such as “Seymour Proctology - Needs Assessment.” It worked, and I got a personal giggle out of the whole thing.

In 2019 I put a companywide “DNS” on team GoWild’s calendars, or “Do Not Schedule.” It’s a sacred time slot that lives on Thursdays, giving everyone two hours to get ahead before going into the weekend. The team is bought in on this, and we all do our best to abide by it. In addition to this DNS, I have two personal ones on Monday and Friday. This lets me drive into work after the weekend while I’m refreshed, and it lets me try to clear my plate before the weekend. I encourage my team to do the same.

The anti-meeting meeting

When we moved into our GoWild office in 2018, we started something fun—the Scurry¹.

I’ve written about it briefly before, but it was a Wednesday afternoon meeting called “Scurry.” We’d bring in snacks and drinks and just hang out, working on projects and talking about the future.

There was one rule for Scurry—you could talk to anyone about any task or project, but you could not set up a time to do so. This was the anti-meeting meeting. Scurry was a free-for-all-creative-problem-solving session. We often found ourselves inspired, writing down ideas on post its, and when we ran out of notes we began writing on the walls and windows (our windows are still covered in notes from these meetings—you could say our windows are literally windows to the past). These two hours became sacred due to the productivity and progress they created.

Mindful meetings

Jeff Bezos famously refused to setup or attend meetings if two pizzas couldn’t feed everyone in attendance. He also didn’t allow Powerpoints, and required everyone to write a thoughtful memo for the meeting. While this sounds quirky, what it does is creates intentionality around the meeting itself.

At times at GoWild, we’ve slipped into meeting bloat. I am a notorious meeting slasher, probably erring on the side of being too aggressively anti meeting (have I mentioned I hate them?). However, I want to build a culture of people who communicate efficiently and understand that a 30 minute meeting with four people is a two hour meeting (30 min X 4 people’s time = 120 minutes). Time wasted compounds, and the opportunity for productivity compresses within the remaining time in your week—now you have less time to do the same amount of work.

This pressure is taxing.

Meetings get oversized and excessively long all too often, and I have no shame in telling people I don’t think they need a meeting on something, even if they asked for it. Too often people go through the motions, wasting time listening to 30 minutes or even an hour of something that could have been an email or a status update.

The consequences

I’m full blown ranting against meetings not because I hate them (although, and I think I’ve mentioned this, I do hate them), but because they can be an underlying cause of productivity problems and even rob your team of their job joy.

Seriously.

Team members will often become stressed about work load or complain about an overwhelming to-do list before they call out that the meetings have gotten ridiculous. Meetings often seem necessary because “we’ve always done it this way,” or they become staples in the work week, such as the dreaded all-hands meetings. Because the meetings feel a part of the process, no one pumps the brakes to say “um, what are we doing here?” On multiple occasions, we’ve cut a weekly check-in or status meeting in favor of a simple Slack check-in or email.

Rarely are meetings the entire problem, but think of this—if your team members are doing three hours of meetings per day, even a 30% reduction of meetings adds more than half a day back to their work week.

Remember—no one signed up for this. Great talent wants to do the work. Sometimes the work is in the meeting, but usually, it’s not. Ditch the meetings, make the talent happy, and build a better product.

3 easy tips to combat calendar fatigue

1) Launch the DNS

I’m telling you, this makes a huge difference. It seems obvious, yet so few people do it. When people have fewer hours for meetings each week, they start to get more selective on what meetings they actually want to book. Start off with 2 hours on the back end of the week and give it a month. Check in with your team and see if they don’t love you for it.

2) Push for intentionality

You don’t have to go full-blown Bezas with a pizza and Powerpoint rule, but ensuring your team is thinking through “do we really need this meeting?” is a great step to cutting down on meetings. I challenge team members all the time on if we really need to meet on something—this alone creates an awareness of the fact that not all meetings are must-haves.

3) Create times for collaboration

Scurry meetings are not for everyone, but they really worked for us for a time when our product was blossoming. We quit doing them after COVID because we went remote and although we tried to do virtual Scurries a few times, it just wasn’t the same. Our team is now about 30% remote, so we didn’t bring it back. However, creating some collaboration time for your time is a great way to get people working together in a more natural way than what often happens in a formal meeting.

¹A group of squirrels is called a Scurry. One of our mascots is SqEarl, a stuffed squirrel. He inspired the name of our Wednesday meetings.

Who I’m listening to: Rattlesnake Milk

What I’m reading: “Leonardo da Vinci” by Walter Isaacson

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