Most meeting advice focuses on how to make meetings more effective or how to cut down on the number of meetings you have altogether.
But what about how to schedule your meetings alongside other work tasks to best manage your productivity?
As Harvard Business Review reports, new academic research explores this question and finds that many people commit two key errors in organizing their schedules: stacking too many meetings together on the same day or pairing intense meetings with other intense tasks.
Both strategies can actually diminish your ability to recharge and replenish during the day, which can be a detriment to your work. HBR lists a couple of strategies to use when scheduling that could help make the workday more productive around meetings:
- Focus on the relative proportion of meeting time to individual work time on a specific day, not just the total hours spent in meetings. This approach requires not overloading a single day with many meetings, even if it may sometimes seem like a time-saving strategy.
- Design your workday to create complements between meetings and individual tasks. Rather than clustering activities of the same pressure level into a single period, distribute challenging tasks and meetings across different days or different time segments of the day.
- Adopt a more holistic approach to workday scheduling. This means being mindful of how a scheduling decision may alter the arrangement pattern of your workday, potentially influencing your energy and productivity
