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.

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

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