No-meeting blocks - defending a policy that enables people to get stuff done

Meetings have their place, especially in collaborative, consensus, or creative organizations. We need to manage the number of meetings to ensure that you have "heads down" time. I have seen at least three different ways of tackling the problem.

1. Create a corporate or department policy.
2. Create a daily multi-hour team meeting.
3. Block out multi-hour blocks on your calendar.

There are other ways that I've never tried.

• Ban all meetings
• Decline all meetings where you are optional.

An average calendar with some protection

This calendar partially successfully guarded 4 ways.  There is a "no meetings before 9:00" policy.  There is a daily "lunch block ". There is a "no meetings Friday afternoon" policy and there is "team time" blocked out for two hours every afternoon.

Video

Video speaker notes

<to be added>

Create a corporate or departmental policy

Things like "no meetings before 9:00", "no meetings during lunch", "no meetings Fridays", "no meetings longer than 30 min".

Create a daily multi-hour team meeting.

Call it something important.

Block out your own multi-hour blocks.

Be honest and call them "head down time" or lie and call them something that people would be afraid of scheduling over the top of.

Created 2022 01