Could you reduce your meetings to zero meetings per week? Could that outweigh the perceived benefits of social interaction and cohesion? And how about productivity and stress?

Determining these outcomes was the objective of a recent study published in MIT Sloan. In it, they surveyed 76 companies with operations in more than 50 countries that had introduced from one to five no-meeting days per week in the past year.

The optimal workweek appears to contain three meetingless days.

If you can’t fathom the idea of three days without meetings, taking the initiative in your team to implement one meeting-free day is a great start. The authors also cite a MeetingScience best practice:

“Ensure that every meeting has a clear agenda and expected outcome. Meetings that lack these two elements probably weren’t thoroughly thought through and, as the saying goes, could probably have just been an email.”

You can read the complete study here, and visit our resource guide for agendas here.