[nirvanis]

I have around 18 hours per week of prebooked meeting time (1:1s, team meetings, planning, 1:1 with manager, sync meetings with different cross initiatives, interviews, candidate screening, etc).

I have observed that my biggest productivity killer are not those meetings (I try to make them useful for me and I try to make sure they are useful for everyone). The biggest problem comes when the time around them is very fragmented. For me, a week with 30 hours of meetings can be more productive than a week with 15 hours if I manage to defragment the time around them.

I have recently worked with my team and other peers to put an effort to defragment my calendar by batching predictable meetings together (this is a process I repeat every 6-12 months) and I feel an immediate boost in focus.

My rule of thumb is trying to make sure I get daily focus slots as close as possible to length X where X is:

X = ( (40 hours) - (prebooked hours in meetings) / (5 weekdays) )

In my case (40-18)/5 = 4.4 hours. I currently have two 4-hour slots monday and tuesday, a 5 hour slot on wednesday and a 3 hour slot on thursdays. Not bad. But that degrades quickly!

[forkexec]

Another technique is to insist on an agenda before any meeting, both for time to prepare and to see if it's pertinent, or the default answer is "no."

Standing meetings are 99% a waste of time, usually about someone/s trying to climb the career stripper pole.

[MiracleUser]

Standing meetings are also used to force procrastinators to report in frequently enough that they stop relying on "secret" all-nighters at the end of the week to get their work done

[daseiner1]

i am both the driver of my team moving to 15-minute stand ups, and the dude “secretly” pulling the occasional heroic all nighters. peak cognitive dissonance rn

[samatman]

hah.

Do you actually get standups resolved in under 15 minutes more than half the time?

If so, what's your secret?

[jakebellacera]

We do, in a team of 10. We have a very strict rule of being prepared before standup and going through the standup list quickly (< 1 min each). We also make sure to keep our list of tasks focused. Any sidebar discussions are taken until the ending of the meeting and all stakeholders who care can be part of it.

I think for us at least, just having the team all aligned on wanting to finish the meeting as fast as possible helps keep it running quickly and smoothly.

[kevstev]

I believe you may be confusing "stand up" from scrum/agile with a "standing" meeting meaning a meeting with a weekly or some other recurring cadence.

A stand up done right is IMHO not a problem and effective. Various other status and weekly meetings generally just waste time.

[mason55]

One thing I did to combat this was refuse to allow any recurring meetings on Fridays. I almost always end up with a couple of one-offs but I can usually put those at the start of the day. Typically this results in 6+ hours of uninterrupted time on Friday.

The rest of my week is a fragmented disaster but at least Fridays are nice.

[kfarr]

Thank you for posting this. I am also in a situation where I am a mid level manager for a globally distributed team. The advice of "just have less meetings" or "force an agenda for all of them" has already been followed -- you really do have to talk a lot of people in certain roles.

I love the idea of a regular "defrag" process. I haven't done this consciously but it's happened that way because I'm in Pacific time zone and we have a EU headquarters, so as a result there is a chunk between 7am-11am Pacific that is almost always booked. Leaves the rest of the day for working time. Not perfect but works for me.

[manquer]

I found this effective to handle fragmentation by accepting only meetings before lunch, doing only post lunch also works . Either mornings or afternoons are fully free to do focused work

[ahpearce]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrupt_coalescing

[conductr]

I calendar my desk time for this reason

[stackdestroyer]

I have tried this with limited success. Sometimes people respect the time you have blocked, most times not. So I end up feeling double booked and frustrated that my attempts to get time to do "real work" are thwarted.