The hack to REINVENT meetings and instantly create 25% more time
Almost a decade ago, I stumbled accidentally into A MEETING HACK that would change the way my teams worked every day since. We instantly created a 25% productivity improvement. Here’s how it happened.
A few years ago, I planned a vacation
Like many of us… especially those of us that have to deal with snow all winter… my wife and I wanted to head to Florida in the Spring. Nothing special – just a week away from the office in the Florida sunshine. I made all the arrangements at work.
I requested the vacation days,
blocked off my calendar,
declined all of my recurring meetings,
set my out-of-office assistant.
I was ready for 10 days in Florida! And then SOMETHING AMAZING happened.
I didn’t go
That’s right. I didn’t go to Florida.
My plans changed. And when I logged back into my work laptop. I opened up my calendar, and just as I was about to flick the toggle from out-of-office back to it’s normal state, I noticed that five, glorious days of EMPTY SPACE. It had been a long time since I had seen a calendar that wasn’t filled to the brim with status meetings, all-hands, and one-on-ones. I thought about how anyone that emailed me would instantly get the notification that I wouldn’t be responding for another 9 days. I thought about how much work I could get done without the constant stop-and-start stream of emails and meetings. I thought about what it might be like, to just come to work for 5 days in a row to do my job.
So I didn’t tell anyone
I worked for 5 days in a row from my house with my out-of-office assistant turned on and it was the most productive week of my career. It was amazing. It’s hard to describe the contrast between what a normal week looks like compared to 5 days of UNINTERRUPTED FOCUS TIME. You should try it.
So I came back on the following Monday and I told my boss I didn’t go to Florida.
“What???”
She was naturally quite surprised. Honestly, I had truly planned to go. But then some things fell through at the last minute. We had to push our family outing to a future time. I told my boss that I took advantage of the time to get caught up on work instead. At first she was a little irritated.
But then I showed her all the work that I got done
I created a new strategic vision for where our product was headed next.
I did some customer analysis of our three biggest competitors
I finished off one of the product requirements documents that had been lingering for months.
Suddenly she was intrigued by this fake-vacation idea. I explained that some of the work I do required DEEP-THINKING and CREATIVITY, and that those things flow better when you have long uninterrupted batches of effort. She agreed and noted that many of our team members would benefit from that as well.
So we conducted a full-team fake-vacation experiment
The whole team turned off email and chat for five full work days. All of our meetings were cancelled. Most people worked from home. But a few decided they liked the separation of home and work so they went into the office. The only rule was that everyone would commit to a full five days of independant, focused work. On the Monday when we all returned, there was a show-and-tell meeting. Everyone discussed for 10 minutes what they had achieved. This gave us all public accountability so that we could ensure we were taking full advantage of the focus.
I called this THE MEETING DETOX.
The Meeting Detox worked so well, that we did it over and over again
One week out of every month, the whole team did this again and again. We took a break from ALL COMMUNICATION – no meetings, no email, and no chat.
I know that sounds crazy. The first few times there were a few issues. People had to stop in the middle to ask each other some questions. Some people weren’t even sure what their job was when we took the meetings off of their calendar. But with each Meeting Detox week, we got better at it and it was amazing. With each attempt we got better at understanding what we were eace responsible for. We got better at planning and prepping for the week.
One week out of every month, we didn’t have any meetings, email, or chat at all. We instantly cut our communication load by 25%. We instantly created 30, or 40, or 50 new hours of new time every time we did this!
People spend a lot of time in meetings
Did you know that, according to McKinsey most knowledge workers spend 68% OF THEIR WEEK or more in meetings, email, and chat? Every day, in the United States alone, there are more than 100 million hours of meetings. Every day!! When you add email and chat to that statistic it grows to more than double.
By conducting a meeting detox one out of every four weeks, our team INSTANTLY SAVED 25% of our time. If you could instantly hire 25% more people, you’d probably jump on that opportunity. This meeting hack created exactly that same productivity improvement.
We hardly missed the meetings at all
Meetings are important. Managers need one-on-ones. Teams need status meetings. Projects need kickoffs. VPs have strategic goals to share. But I’ve proven, again and again, that you CAN SKIP MEETINGS for one full week, and your team will benefit from it more than it suffers. People on teams disappear for a week all the time and it’s no big deal. When they return, they find out what they missed. They catch up almost instantly. There’s even less to catch up on when the whole team is on a Meeting Detox.