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At some point, meetings are counterproductive\u2014and employees must be given a block of time without them to get work done.<\/p>\n
That sentiment has led some companies to implement a \u201cno-meeting day\u201d policy. Last year, for instance, Shopify<\/a> made Wednesday such a day<\/a>, part of a \u201ccalendar purge\u201d to give employees more time to focus. Soon after, workers trying to schedule a meeting on that day received<\/a> an automated Slack reminder asking them to reconsider.\u00a0<\/p>\n Block<\/a>, the financial technology firm helmed by Twitter<\/a> cofounder Jack Dorsey, recently settled on Tuesday as its no-meeting day.\u00a0<\/p>\n Kristen Anderson, who serves as product lead for Block\u2019s Cash App, celebrated the move on Friday, writing on X<\/a>: \u201cSo @jack made Tuesdays a \u2018No Meeting Day\u2019 across Block, and I am unbelievably pumped\u2026Less talk about the work. More work. Here for it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Jeff Stephens, CTO at Dignari, replied<\/a>: \u201cThis really needs to become standard practice. Meeting fatigue is real and not just due to the quantity of meetings. Many times it\u2019s just a few meetings but they are sprinkled throughout the day just enough to prevent real quality work being done in the gaps.\u201d<\/p>\n Paul Graham, an influential Silicon Valley essayist who cofounded the startup accelerator Y Combinator, delved into the problem of too many meetings in a 2009 post<\/a> entitled \u201cMaker\u2019s Schedule, Manager\u2019s Schedule.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In it, he described the differences between how a maker views meetings, versus how a manager does.<\/p>\n The schedule of a manager, he noted, often consists of one meeting after another, with a day cut into one-hour intervals. But a maker\u2014say, a programmer or writer\u2014needs at least half a day to get real work done. If a meeting is inserted into that block of time, it\u2019s a \u201cdisaster\u201d for a maker, Graham wrote: \u201cA single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.\u201d<\/p>\n Worse, a meeting in the afternoon can cause a maker to not start anything ambitious in the morning, knowing the day will be interrupted later. That, in turn, can hurt morale. As Graham put it:<\/p>\n \u201cDon\u2019t your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don\u2019t. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.\u201d<\/p>\n This helps explain why someone like Anderson is \u201cunbelievably pumped\u201d to have a day with no meetings.<\/p>\n Aram Attar, founder of The VC Factory in Paris, responded<\/a> to Anderson\u2019s post by describing Graham\u2019s essay as \u201cone of the most defining pieces of business thought\u201d he\u2019d ever read, calling it \u201ctruly worklife changing.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Not every company that tries a no-meeting day likes it, however. Last August, Zoom<\/a> announced an end<\/a> to Wednesday being such a day.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe move fast, and this effort has become more of a barrier to collaboration than it was intended,\u201d CEO Eric Yuan wrote in a memo. \u201cAnd as an increasingly global company, no Internal Meeting Wednesday creates a lack of clarity for Zoomies working across multiple time zones.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\nSubscribe to the CEO Daily newsletter to get the CEO perspective on the biggest headlines in business. Sign up<\/a> for free.<\/div>\n