One of the fascinating things you’ll discover as a team with #meetingscience – meeting density per day. The below chart shows you how meetings stack up in your organization in a given week (or series of weeks). The darker the color, the more people are consumed by meetings at that time. In the below example, this company has an overseas office (hence the Sunday meetings), with a few pockets of free time on Tuesday afternoons and Thursday afternoons.
Many ‘experts’ espouse the theory that a company should devote an entire day to ‘no meetings.’ While interesting in theory, no current science supports a claim that a ‘no meeting day’ improves productivity (while a potentially good idea, it hasn’t been scientifically tested).
In this example, eliminating an entire day would be like starting a diet on New Year’s – a good idea in theory, but not practical or sustainable.
To create sustainable change, instead, companies should embrace the idea of incremental, atomic change, starting with pockets of meeting freedom (for more on how to create great habits, we highly recommend reading James Clear‘s Atomic Habits).
Our software helps companies look at their #meetingdensity to identify pockets of open time for all.
