Some organizations are so addicted to meetings that work has to take the backseat. A quick and easy solution is to bar meetings during certain hours of the day, or for entire days, so that people can focus on getting work done. Plenty of organizations swear by idea, just Google “No meeting Thursday”.

Me? I get the shivers whenever I hear of the idea. For three reasons:

  1. It doesn’t solve the underlying problem of why there are so many meetings that people don’t find useful in the first place.
  2. It assumes all meetings are bad, thus blocking critical decisions or discussions that need to take place.
  3. What happens to the meetings that won’t happen on Thursday? They’re not just going to go away. Pity every other day that’s going to be left to carry Thursday’s slack.

A ‘no meeting day’ feels like a band-aid solution, where the band-aid has already started coming off.

If we scratch beneath the surface, we might find problems that are deeper rooted. Are the meetings set up to do hand-overs, clear dependencies, or align objectives? Maybe teams are not organised around the flow of value to the customer. Is it that the team is meeting one stakeholder after the other? It may be that too many projects are underway at the same time and there are no work-in-progress (WIP) limits. Or is that people who require several hours en bloc to work productively are frequently interrupted? Understanding “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” may help build empathy and consideration for the varying natures of our work1.

Peter Block says:

Transformation comes more from pursuing profound questions than seeking practical answers.

When the underlying problems are corrected, meetings that don’t need to happen, whether right now or at all, will naturally stop happening.

  1. Thanks to Christoph Pinkel for pointing this out. ↩