- Madeline Mann, CEO of Self Made Millennial, schedules no meetings on Tuesdays and Fridays.
- Mann found that calls disrupted her ability to focus, prompting her to block off two days each week.
- Other companies have also implemented days without meetings to boost productivity.
A couple of years ago, founder Madeline Mann wasn't happy with how she was getting things done at work.
So, she made a list of when she felt productive and when she felt her time was well spent.
At the top: building something and checking off her to-do's.
When Mann didn't feel productive was on calls. So, the CEO of the career-coaching service Self Made Millennial decided that her calendar would remain free from meetings on Tuesdays and Fridays.
"It changed my life," Mann told Business Insider.
She isn't the first boss to try to wrangle meetings to certain days or times. Asana, the maker of productivity tools, aims to keep Wednesdays free from internal meetings, for example. Yet what appears less common is crossing two days off the calendar, as Mann has done.
Now, with all her meetings stacked on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, Mann said she's getting much more completed than when calls were sprinkled throughout her calendar.
"The context-switching of going from call to deep work to call just wasn't working," she said.
Meetings still have a place
Mann isn't necessarily anti-meeting.
"There are also good things that come out of it, but psychologically, it felt not as productive," Mann said.
Her approach isn't for everyone, she said. Some people who work for her, for example, need to talk to clients — or potential ones.
Mann said that with that type of work, it's possible to tap out emails between meetings. Besides, maintaining a flexible calendar is important for clients.
"So, a role like that, to take two entire no-meeting days, would be completely counterproductive," she said.
Yet, Mann said that for another worker who wrote a lot of marketing copy, having long stretches without meetings let him go deep.
"Something like that is really important for him to focus," she said.
Finding your GSD day
Meetings can be both a productivity boon and a time suck, depending on how well they're conceived and run, among other factors. But getting a break from even good ones can give a team a collective breather.
The software maker Atlassian points to the benefits of a day free from meetings, calls, and even email. For companies that are spread across vast geographies, Atlassian recommends that what it calls "get sh*t done" days might be Monday for people in the Asia-Pacific region and Friday for workers in the US, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
That way, there's more time available for coworkers across continents to collaborate.
Cutting out meetings can help
Meetings took off during the pandemic as more of us worked remotely, and "checking in" became a bigger part of our days. In the years since virtual happy hours were a thing, time in meetings has started to recede. Yet gatherings can still clog our calendars.
That's why periodic pruning is wise. Matt Martin, CEO and cofounder of the calendar management company Clockwise, previously told BI that meeting time tends to creep up as the year progresses.
That's because some companies instruct workers at the start of a year to audit their meetings and zap unnecessary ones. But when they inevitably grow back, meetings can be a big drain on workers' time.
"You have this really valuable central resource, but nobody's responsible for it collectively," Martin said. "So it just gets exhausted and trampled."
Mann, from Self-Made Millennial, understands the value of her time. So, she prioritizes guarding the wide-open spaces on her calendar on Tuesdays and Fridays.
"That has really increased my productivity," Mann said.