Less meetings, more focused work

Applying ideas from computer performance optimization and reliability engineering to improve organizational productivity

According to research from Fuze, unproductive meetings waste 15% of an organization’s collective paid time. For middle management, that figure increases to 35%. For upper management, that figure is 50%!
Research shows that it takes 10–15 minutes for programmers to get back to work after an interruption. (Solingen, Parnin)
Today’s knowledge workers typically spend more than 85% of their time in meetings, which studies show negatively affects people’s psychological, physical, and mental well-being. — MITSloan

This is part of a series about how to reduce meetings in favor of focused work while saving money.

Less meetings, more focused work

They all borrow ideas from performance and reliability engineering to improve efficiency.

• Meeting budgets: set a cap on how much time should a role spend in meetings
• Calendar Defragmentation: move meetings next to each other
• Meeting-free days: exactly what it sounds like, but hopefully the post did a good job motivating WHY this counter-intuitive method works
• Async meeting: my personal favorite which is behind how ADRs (an upcoming article) work