Do you feel like a huge amount of your working week is taken up by meetings? You’re not alone. Executives spend an average of 23 hours a week in formal meetings, not counting the casual corridor or pop up meeting. That’s more than doubled since the 1960s when it was less than 10%.
But meetings are needed for collaboration and idea generation, so is it possible to balance meeting time with focused creative thinking time, to make more of your working week and get ahead faster?
Recently, I moved from working in a city office to predominantly working from a home office. My productivity and output has at least doubled.
Why? I now have a limited chunk of time for face to face meetings so I need to be focused; there are less distractions, without casual, unscheduled meetings, so when I schedule time for emails, phone calls or focus tasks, they are rarely interrupted.
It made me think about how my clients might be able to do the same in a busy office environment.
It’s all about structure.
Designated days
Get together with your team and set aside times or days for collaboration, focus and meetings. Allocated designated team time for focus tasks where contact is minimal unless urgent. If everyone is working on focus tasks at the same time, disruptions will be naturally limited.
Get specific
Make use of ‘overflow blocks’ where you add buffer slots to your schedule if you don’t know how long something will take. The image below shows my online calendar for a random Tuesday last month. Notice that I leave extra room, next to some of my time blocks, so changes can be made easily if the day unfolds in an unexpected way. Explanatory notes for these blocks can be expanded on in the body of the appointment or meeting.
Eat the frog first
“If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.” Mark Twain.
Schedule major, difficult or essential-but-boring tasks first up. Later in the day, they are easy to put off, and you can waste a lot of time procrastinating. Get into the habit of doing the hardest things first (and persevere to completion) then it’s all downhill from there.
Chunking
Batch similar tasks together. For instance, if you have two people you need to call and three people you need to email, combine those tasks into single or consecutive blocks.
It can help to build the routine by scheduling similar types of work at the same time each day. Have small Deep Work and Shut Down routines that tell your brain that you are going to do Deep Work now or that you are going to stop working now, i.e. making yourself a cup of tea and closing Outlook before starting Deep Work, or at the end of each day checking your calendar for the next day and then closing your laptop.
Block out small amounts of time in your calendar for any meetings or issues that might come up unexpectedly. If someone requests a meeting with you, you can tell them exactly when you are available.
Schedule meetings back-to-back. The time between them is often wasted because it is not long enough to do deep work.
Set up blocks of time to answer emails rather than living in your inbox all day.
‘Just one more thing’ syndrome
If you need to go online to check something, resist the urge to check ‘just one more thing’ while you are there. Get into the habit of doing a single task then getting back to what you were doing.
Even though it seems more efficient to do a couple of other things while you are there, the reality is that multitasking actually makes you slower overall. You spend unnecessary time getting your head back into your focus task once you are distracted.
If you enjoyed this post and it will help with your productivity, please get in touch for a free 30-minute consultation! If we are not already connected on LinkedIn, please send me a connection request mentioning this post.
