[lvturner]

I tried this, it didn't work well for my team.

For whatever reason, my team generally likes having scheduled times to discuss certain topics. I always give them optionality on the meeting however (i.e. we regularly review if a given meeting is causing more pain than it's solving)

[Trasmatta]

In that situation, I think just the goal of minimizing the amount of meetings to the best of your team's ability would still help. Preferably 2 hours or less total, but 3 or 4 might be okay if special care is taken to when they are scheduled.

My meetings all get scattered throughout the week haphazardly such that getting even a few hours of dedicated work done is almost impossible on many days.