Some days at work I’ve got only half-hour gaps between meetings. I don’t care how adept people are at taking meetings, no one is going to get proper thinking work done in those gaps. If it was repetitive work, sure, you could get back into the groove of things, but even that takes some wind up time. Even worse if you’re in-office and expected to attend the meetings in-person.
It’s not uncommon for me to only have one or two 30-minute breaks between 8:30am and 5pm. I’ve gotten to the point that if I have over 2 hours without meetings I often feel like I get nothing done, because I’ve gotten pretty good at getting a few things (emails or messages, not deep work) knocked out in the 5-10 min in between calls. I can only really focus on deeper work at night after everyone else has signed off.
Not really a sustainable way of doing work, I’m also not doing as much hands-on work these days. A lot of my meeting time is 1-on-1s with my team and making sure they have what they need to move forward, make decisions, and get work done or with other people to try to remove barriers to help the team be able to move forward. So in that sense, the meetings ARE the work.
Some days at work I’ve got only half-hour gaps between meetings. I don’t care how adept people are at taking meetings, no one is going to get proper thinking work done in those gaps. If it was repetitive work, sure, you could get back into the groove of things, but even that takes some wind up time. Even worse if you’re in-office and expected to attend the meetings in-person.
It’s not uncommon for me to only have one or two 30-minute breaks between 8:30am and 5pm. I’ve gotten to the point that if I have over 2 hours without meetings I often feel like I get nothing done, because I’ve gotten pretty good at getting a few things (emails or messages, not deep work) knocked out in the 5-10 min in between calls. I can only really focus on deeper work at night after everyone else has signed off.
Not really a sustainable way of doing work, I’m also not doing as much hands-on work these days. A lot of my meeting time is 1-on-1s with my team and making sure they have what they need to move forward, make decisions, and get work done or with other people to try to remove barriers to help the team be able to move forward. So in that sense, the meetings ARE the work.