The common advice about meetings is to try and chunk them together in your day. The argument is it’s better to have four hours back to back of meetings than having them all spread out with little 30 minute breaks in between. After all – what meaningful work can you really get done in 30 minutes?
On one hand, I find this advice to be helpful. I hate having a day with no solid, uninterrupted blocks of time to get things done. And chunking meetings together can be a good way to carve out that time.
But on the other hand, I hate having a wall of meetings. It’s a jump from one discussion to the next, with no chance to digest what the last discussion meant, or to make plans for what to do about it. By the time you reach meeting 3 or 4, it all feels like a bit of a waste of time. It feels like you’re going to need to have these meetings again anyway.
After spending years trying both ways, I don’t think there’s any perfect trick to managing a schedule of meetings, other than the real solution, which is to just have fewer meetings. That’s tougher advice to put into action, but it’s the only option that solves the root of the issue: there’s just not enough time in the day.
We’ve all got to get better at saying no. No to attending meetings that we’re not essential to. No to scheduling meetings with others that cannot be accomplished another way.
After all, as Jason over at Basecamp likes to say, there’s no such thing as a one hour meeting.