Meeting Free Days 📅

The problem with cutting off everyone's meeting allowance on a particular day is that it doesn't address the original causes of meeting-bloat.

It's the dream: miles and miles of open calendar space in which to enjoy focus, achieve flow and do our best work. As meetings proliferate, companies invariably turn to more and more robust tools to carve out the space that used to seem so abundant. One particular tool with rising popularity is a no-meeting day.

It sounds great - just declare bankruptcy on anything that was scheduled, shift any truly important stuff to another day and free up everyone's time. As with anything, the devil's in the details. There are, in fact, a raft of important questions that can have a major impact on the effectiveness of no-meeting days. These include...

• How much meeting-free time is going to be impactful? Half a day, a whole day, two days? How often?

• Who is involved? Everyone? Are there exceptions? Who and why?

• What happens to customer-facing meetings?

• What about recurring meetings?

• Is a 1-on-1 a 'meeting' or not (for the purposes of this idea)?

• Will leaders set a good example?

• Will all the meetings just pop up again in text form as endless Slack chat?

The problem with cutting off everyone's meeting allowance on a particular day is that it doesn't address the original causes of meeting-bloat.

If you'd like to know more, our 5-minute article describes where you can start and how to take a systematic approach.