By Back in the day (goodness I guess I can say that now), Fridays typically had no meetings. Because of this, Fridays ended up being the day you played catch-up on all your to-dos for the week. I’m not sure when (I blame the pandemic) but in my last few years of corporate employment, Friday meetings became the norm. That combined with noon meetings because headquarters was in the Central time zone. While 11 am was an ideal time to meet for those in Central time, we Eastern time zoners experienced stomach grumbling for an hour. Or turned off our cameras and muted so we could gulp down lunch. Or worse, left the cameras and mics on so others could witness the horror of ‘see’ food.
There’s lots of theories on why meetings have increased. The best/saddest is that meetings increase as trust decreases. Losing trust in your team is hugely problematic. For an implementation/project to be successful, I have to trust that you can do your job/complete your deliverables, so that I can focus on my responsibilities. Projects rarely recover when that trust is lost. And I’ve seen colleagues earn reputations of being untrustworthy (unable to complete deliverables) that they rarely can shake. Reputations can make or break you.
Back to the issue at hand, Friday’s overdose of meetings. The problem with meetings is that there is only so much time in the day to work. If you’re meeting, most of the time you’re not working. As my friend and I joked many times ‘meetings are up, productivity is down.’.
When I ran a team I tried two things: no email Friday and no meeting Friday. The purpose was to see if we could return Friday to a catch-up day full of amazing productivity. I still believe in these approaches and have added one more that has to do with maintaining connections: Friday catch-up (with connections)
For me, Friday is now used to catch up with colleagues, friends, family, prospects (not necessarily in that order). And that has been fun! I highly recommend you enforce one of those 3 Friday rules and see how your Fridays change!
What if I tried no emails and no meetings and all the days that end with the letter “Y”, instead of just Fridays? That sounds nice….
Perhaps leave your out of office on permanently with this line ‘Please know that most problems will resolve themselves or end up not being that important. But if this is really important, call me.’
I love this!! So true! I have to get to a meeting about another meeting.