No Meeting Friday!

There was a huge positive response to last week’s tweets about no meetings on Fridays.  So, I thought it was appropriate for us to officially designate Fridays as “No Meeting Fridays.”

Many people have been saying that they are booked for so many meetings that they cannot get their work done.  Have you ever finished a work day and thought, “Wow, I was in meetings all day… I did not have one minute to do my work.”

If you let them, the “Outlook Outlaws” will take all of your time.  They will schedule unneccesary meetings all over your calendar.  They will steal your valuable time.

And let’s face it… most of these meetings are not worth the time committed…

• They have no agenda – What are we even meeting about?
• People are late – Very productive when you start 20 minutes late.
• Are poorly run – Deteriorate into a 25 minutes discussion of hockey or last night’s TV shows.
• Run over their time limit
• Accomplish little – After your last meeting were there any decisions or actions to be taken? Or just another meeting scheduled?
• People doing other things – What happens when meetings are poorly run & people are stuck in them all day?  People resort to doing their work during meetings!

So, let’s take back one day of the week for productivity!

The idea here is to protect an entire day for productivity.  Let’s spend Friday getting things done. Projects. Reports. Creative work. One-on-one coaching. Things that require time and are important.

So, how do you protect your Friday?

Start simple.  Block it out.  If you want to protect your time, you need to “Block it out.” If you do not schedule yourself for time to do work… you will quickly find that you do not have any.

“But, my employer will not allow me to do work all day on Friday.”  (How silly does that statement sound?)

Go ahead, block out all Friday.  Feels good, doesn’t it?

I did this last week. Now, a week later, I am happy to see my Friday schedule. I have only one 0.5 hour meeting this morning at 9AM.  After 930AM, I have the rest of the day scheduled to work on my projects.

If you block your Friday, you will observe a few things:

• Most people will avoid scheduling on Friday.
• A few will not – these are the people who would have double/triple booked your calendar anyway, or they have something important – these are the people you want to meet with anyway.
• Friday will quickly become your most productive day of the week.  What a great feeling to finish the work week!