[bambax]

All true; I have also recently discovered that meetings at the start of the day are not a solution to this problem, because if the meeting is intense (in good or bad, but the effect is more pronounced if the meeting went bad) then you can spend the rest of the day thinking about it.

The only solution I can think of about the meeting problem is to have them all in the same day. A day with even just one meeting is ruined, however you organize it. Let's have them all the same day.

[kzrdude]

Sometimes you have two meetings at the start of the day and you end up feeling like you spent most of your day's energy on those meetings: they were intense. Usually intense means that new consequences for a project were revealed, new problems, new deadlines, and sometimes intense discussions also resolve problems or the path ahead, but still cost a lot of energy to accomplish.

[afarrell]

If a work meeting ruins your day by prompting rumination, I think that indicates a separate problem with how your workplace communicates.

[dr_kiszonka]

And/or suggests that the person you are replying to could benefit from, e.g., cognitive behavioral therapy.

[SomeBoolshit]

I don't think I've ever had an intense meeting but the last thing any of them does is ruin my day.

My usual response is to not even remember what was discussed minutes after it's over.

But I also think most of the meetings I take part in are useless.

[gymbeaux]

We did this at Allstate circa 2015 and it worked really well. I’m not sure how popular this idea was elsewhere in the company, but our team had all meetings on Wednesday (minus the daily scrum). We were remote Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Came in only on Wednesday for the meetings. Wednesday was the perfect day because it was hump day, and it went by quickly typically, because of all the meetings (and coworker conversation). As a software engineer, it was hard to get anything done on Wednesday because coworkers would ping me (in person of course) with questions about the software and so on. Like how can I test this feature, has this feature been pushed to the QA environment, etc. I won’t say that part was necessarily ideal, but being remote 4 days/week allowed me and the other devs to concentrate free of the “annoying” coworkers.

This was in 2015, and they’d been doing it for some time prior.