How Can I Do Deep Work Between Lots of Meetings?

00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC]

00:00:04.800 | Let's move on to questions.

00:00:06.480 | We will start as always with questions about deep work.

00:00:11.240 | And our first question comes from Allison.

00:00:13.520 | Allison asks, a recent corporate trend is to limit meetings to 30 minutes,

00:00:19.720 | which means you have twice as many meetings in one day,

00:00:22.640 | all with different people on different subjects.

00:00:25.760 | It's exhausting.

00:00:27.080 | How can I get deep work done in between these short but

00:00:30.320 | taxing meetings, or should I even be trying?

00:00:32.520 | Well, Allison, I think we have two issues here.

00:00:35.920 | Our first issue is just the abundance of meetings,

00:00:41.000 | the increased abundance of meetings being an issue in work today.

00:00:46.160 | And then the second issue is what right now you can do about that reality,

00:00:50.000 | given that you can't change it tomorrow.

00:00:51.720 | So there's this bigger picture.

00:00:52.800 | Point here is that we have too many meetings.

00:00:54.600 | Why do we have too many meetings?

00:00:56.040 | Well, I think there's a couple things going on here, but

00:00:58.760 | one of the most important is that we don't have a lot of good systems in place for

00:01:04.240 | how we accomplish the work that happens regularly in our teams.

00:01:07.760 | So a meeting becomes a proxy for more well-developed productivity systems.

00:01:14.280 | Something falls on your plate.

00:01:15.720 | We have to figure out a new strategy for client acquisition.

00:01:20.640 | The easiest thing you can do is say, let's get everyone in a meeting.

00:01:25.160 | Because now what has happened, you have put something on your calendar,

00:01:29.200 | you know everyone will show up, you know you will see it,

00:01:31.840 | you know progress will be made.

00:01:33.440 | Because as I say, there's only two productivity systems that every

00:01:36.400 | knowledge worker actually absolutely trust they will see, their email inbox and

00:01:40.440 | their calendar, so you know you will see that.

00:01:42.400 | You know everyone will show up, you'll know some sort of progress is made.

00:01:46.200 | The issue is, if there's lots of projects going on,

00:01:48.720 | each of which needs to keep making progress, we get a lot of meetings.

00:01:53.160 | Let's all just get together, let's all just talk, and

00:01:54.880 | we feel like some sort of progress has been made.

00:01:56.520 | So to solve this bigger problem, if we apply the type of solutions I talk about

00:02:01.520 | in my book, A World Without Email, where we actually break down the work we do into

00:02:05.760 | its constituent processes, and we ask for each,

00:02:08.600 | how do we actually want to implement this process?

00:02:11.000 | Where does the information come in?

00:02:13.080 | How do we assign and track work?

00:02:14.480 | When and how do we talk about this work?

00:02:16.360 | What steps can be basically automated?

00:02:18.080 | It always happens A, B, and C, and what steps actually need discussion?

00:02:21.800 | Can we batch this discussion with other things?

00:02:23.640 | Can we have a lot of structure to that discussion?

00:02:25.440 | Can it happen at the same time?

00:02:27.400 | When you begin to structure these processes,

00:02:29.360 | you get away from just throwing meetings at a problem, which turns out to be just

00:02:32.760 | a very high overhead, low effectivity way of actually trying to get things done.

00:02:38.760 | So I think that's the big picture solution.

00:02:40.480 | In the small picture, Allison, you're facing a ton of meetings today, and

00:02:45.880 | that's not going to change tomorrow.

00:02:48.120 | What can you do?

00:02:49.640 | There's two things I would recommend.

00:02:51.920 | One, add 15 to 30 minutes to the end of every meeting that you schedule.

00:02:57.720 | So if someone schedules a half hour meeting, you put aside the full hour.

00:03:02.560 | And what do you do in that second 15 to 30 minutes?

00:03:05.960 | That's where you make sense of, organize, act on, and

00:03:08.960 | otherwise take action on what was discussed in that meeting.

00:03:11.640 | So while it's still fresh in your head, you clarify it.

00:03:15.120 | Okay, so what's really going on here?

00:03:16.400 | What do I really need to do?

00:03:17.960 | What can I do right now if there's a few small things just to get that done?

00:03:21.300 | Is there some big thing I now have to do?

00:03:22.920 | Let me figure out maybe when I'm going to do that, get that on my calendar,

00:03:25.560 | get this stuff into my systems,

00:03:27.520 | make sure that I have full closure on what's happening in that meeting.

00:03:31.480 | There is nothing worse than finishing a meeting that opens up seven or

00:03:35.160 | eight loops.

00:03:35.720 | And before you can close those loops, you have to jump into another meeting,

00:03:38.760 | which generates more loops, which conflicts with them.

00:03:41.160 | So add 15 to 30 minutes on the end of every meeting.

00:03:44.520 | Now you can get closure cognitively on each of these meetings.

00:03:47.600 | So that's the first thing I would suggest.

00:03:49.360 | Two, start scheduling meetings with yourself.

00:03:52.080 | Use the same calendar that you use for your other meetings.

00:03:57.400 | Treat and respect those meetings like you would any other.

00:04:00.520 | Once that time is blocked, that time is blocked.

00:04:02.800 | But they are meetings with yourself that you actually use as time dedicated to

00:04:07.960 | a specific task that's going to benefit from unbroken concentration.

00:04:11.200 | You probably can't block off all of your time and say, great,

00:04:16.240 | seven hours a day, I'm just going to be doing deep work.

00:04:20.800 | And there's only 30 minutes left and it's only at this one time.

00:04:23.680 | But you can say, I'm going to give myself a two hour meeting today and

00:04:26.160 | two one hour meetings on Wednesday.

00:04:27.560 | And these are meetings with myself.

00:04:29.320 | So that time is blocked on my calendar.

00:04:31.000 | I will not overschedule it with something else.

00:04:32.560 | And it makes sure that progress gets done on things that actually require

00:04:35.240 | concentration.

00:04:36.320 | So those two things, add the 15 to 30 minutes on the end of every meeting

00:04:39.760 | schedule to get closure.

00:04:41.480 | Plus, scheduling meetings with yourself for

00:04:44.360 | making progress on things that require unbroken concentration.

00:04:47.960 | That will release the burden.

00:04:49.960 | I'm going to add a bonus suggestion here that I had first brought up in a recent

00:04:54.200 | episode.

00:04:54.720 | So let me just remind you of this bonus suggestion,

00:04:57.760 | which was this notion of one for you, one for me.

00:05:00.080 | Okay, so an issue I talked about, this might have been last week or

00:05:05.960 | the week before, an issue I talked about when it came to trying to protect a large

00:05:10.320 | amount of your time for no meetings, for unbroken concentration,

00:05:15.960 | is that even if you are in a role in which that is reasonable,

00:05:20.240 | it's hard to figure out when that time should be in advance.

00:05:22.680 | So let's say, for example, you are in development and

00:05:26.920 | four out of eight hours a day, you really should be programming.

00:05:29.480 | Sometimes it's hard to say, I'm just going to block off the entire afternoon,

00:05:32.200 | because that might be the only time that two out of three people in the executive

00:05:37.680 | committee that needs you to meet with them to talk about a new hiring policy.

00:05:40.840 | That's the only time they can meet is the afternoon.

00:05:42.560 | And it's actually a real issue if you blocked off in advance the entire

00:05:45.480 | afternoon, there's not enough flexibility.

00:05:48.840 | If you're going to block off a lot of time,

00:05:50.240 | there's not enough flexibility in your schedule to do that in advance.

00:05:53.440 | So the suggestion I gave a couple weeks ago was don't block off

00:05:58.800 | that deep work time completely in advance.

00:06:01.680 | Do a one for you, one for me strategy.

00:06:04.040 | If I book a 90 minute meeting on the Tuesday, at that point,

00:06:08.640 | I will then put aside 90 minutes somewhere else in the day for deep work.

00:06:11.480 | And then if someone comes around and says, okay,

00:06:12.800 | here's a 30 minute meeting we need to do, great, book that.

00:06:15.720 | And at that point, take another 30 minutes somewhere else in the day for

00:06:19.200 | your deep work.

00:06:20.360 | So you fill in that time for

00:06:23.240 | undistracted work throughout the day.

00:06:26.600 | As you fill it in with more meetings, you take more and more time.

00:06:29.040 | So you leave more flexibility.

00:06:30.800 | All right, so I said I'd give you two suggestions, Allison,

00:06:33.320 | but I'm tired of meetings, so I gave you three.

00:06:36.360 | Quick summary, add time to your meetings to get closure.

00:06:39.520 | Two, at the very least, schedule meetings with yourself.

00:06:43.760 | And three, if you want to block off significant amounts of time to be meeting

00:06:47.480 | free, instead of doing that all in advance, do the one for you, one for me method.

00:06:51.920 | So you can have more flexibility in scheduling meetings with other people,

00:06:54.640 | but still end up with a fair amount of time blocked off.

00:06:57.800 | [MUSIC]

How Can I Do Deep Work Between Lots of Meetings?

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