Does anyone have so many meetings per week that it prevents you from getting thoughtful work done? If they’re not meetings you can miss and your calendar blocks aren’t respected, what do you do? Thanks in advance!

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We had no meeting days or no meeting afternoons. This helped people get work done in those times. We struggled with a lot of adhoc meetings. So on meeting allowed days we had recurring meeting where we would send in the agenda before hand. More coordination required, but less meetings

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Yes it was a top down approach for us.

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I start work earlier than most at my company (8am) and it’s rare for anyone to want meetings before 10 so that gives me a good 2 hours to get stuff done most mornings. I usually don’t get much deep work done outside those hours as like many others, I have to spend a lot of my time in meetings or I simply get interrupted with small requests throughout the day.

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A good practice is blocking off two hours as private for everyday jobs and be selfish about scheduling over that time. I tell my coworkers that unless it’s a revenue generating meeting (ie customer sales meetings) to find another time on my calendar. I personally also keep internal calls solely on Monday and thursdays. No internal meeting should last longer than 30 minutes unless it is a working session. That’s how I do it but figure out a plan that works for you.

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If your meeting blocks aren’t respected ever, you have to decline meetings. Self advocate!

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A number of my workers write “do not schedule without asking” on their blocks. That way it puts the shame on the person who tries to rather than them when they reject. I like it and makes me respect their time more

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I mark my entire calendar as private, so no one can see what my blocks are for. I've found when people can't see the name of your meeting (or the attendees), they are less likely to book over them.

Then, I have a reminder on my cal every Monday morning to block off about 75% of all my time for the upcoming few weeks, only leaving 25% open for actual meetings. I treat (and communicate) my 75% blocks as "unmovable conflicts."

It's the only way I ever get anything done.

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I do the exact same thing. When I have too much to do and too many meetings I just start blocking off my calendar to get things done.

Decline

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It’s what I’d like to do and have tried but then I ultimately end up being the one who suffers because I missed context I needed for my work.

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Decline and provide a reason.

likehelpful

I like that idea too. Thank you!

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I had this problem in my previous position, it was worsened by working in Higher Ed where meetings for the sake of meetings are the golden standard.

Unfortunately the first step is to start declining those meetings. It was hard for me at first to say no all the time.

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That seems very hard...thanks for the insight.

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I used to have this problem too. What I ended up doing was ruthlessly decline and read minutes of standing meetings. I can read and understand the minutes In a few mins than sitting through 2 hrs of meeting. Other thing I realised was that I was being piled into too many execution issues which was someone else’s responsibility to sort out. Once I pushed back, the person who is really responsible for started doing his job 😜

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This is suele helpful too. I’ll start pushing to have meeting minutes or notes taken since that’s not something my org does. I’m also going to think more about the responsibilities I might be making up for. Thank you!

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I agree with the other two, but am also suffering your same issues.

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Thanks for empathizing with me.

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If you are managing a team - one thing you could do is empower your team to own some items and delegate some meetings to them.

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That’s a tough one if they are meetings you can’t miss. If there is no opportunity to shift the company culture is there a very trusted colleague you can partner with and the 2 of you share summaries of meetings where only one of you attends?

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Yeah, that’s fair. I’m in the 80 hour a week boat atm so it’s time to decline. Thanks!

When I went back to being IC the meetings disappeared.

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Lol you solved the problem. Let’s all be ACs 😄. For real though it might be an option for engineers but not for PMs unless the company’s culture is no meetings

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Long blocks on calendar are hard. But instead make multiple one hour blocks.

For the transparency side you can simply put in the title (working on vision doc - do not book) or other activities. Ideally people will at least make an effort to avoid booking but yea I still get frequently double and triple booked anyway.

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I use that today and love it!

We have no meeting days for ICs doing product development work, and a few of us have been using clockwise to optimize focus time. I've been loving it

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I use that too!

Our company is very transparent about calendar availability so slack, zoom, email, etc. shows when you are available or in a meeting plus your calendar so people are always trying to book and double book my time to the point where I would get behind on work or end up working 14 hour days to keep up so I started blocking Mondays and Fridays and show as out of the office so up to me whether I want to take meetings or not and it gives me two days a week to finish up work and be ready for my weekly scrum meetings and status update meetings, customer meetings, etc.

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Yeah! I’ve thought about taking “out of office days” where I’m really just catching up on stuff. I wasn’t sure if it would send the wrong message though.

Our company established the first Wednesday of every month a No Meeting day and placed a busy block on everyone’s calendars for those days for the foreseeable future.

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Yeah, I think the company setting that is the only way for it to work...

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In a remote env., if everyone's only instinct is to schedule or jump on a video call to communicate, then you're definitely going to struggle with meeting madness. My company recently started "Async Wednesdays" where there are no internal Zoom meetings - all communication is done through asynchronous channels. That doesn't necessarily mean more emails or Slack convos either. We're leaning into video messaging and screen recording to communicate, which has really been the most efficient way to keep productive and not load up other days with back-to-back meetings.

We also do "flipped meetings" where people will send a video presentation or video message before the meeting, so we can collaborate together in a shorter amount of time. It's also helped us work better with our people in Asia, UK, any other time zones.

Curious if anyone else is experimenting with async video comms to relieve the meeting fatigue?

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Depending on how open your leadership team is to the suggestion, we decided to do a no meeting day. Everyone in our department has absolutely zero meetings (from my SVP down to the newest hire) on one day every other week. I’ve also talked to people who consistently scheduled over time that’s booked on my calendar to set some boundaries. Hope that helps!

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It does, thank you!

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