Let's move on to questions. We will start as always with questions about deep work. And our first question comes from Allison. Allison asks, a recent corporate trend is to limit meetings to 30 minutes, which means you have twice as many meetings in one day, all with different people on different subjects.

It's exhausting. How can I get deep work done in between these short but taxing meetings, or should I even be trying? Well, Allison, I think we have two issues here. Our first issue is just the abundance of meetings, the increased abundance of meetings being an issue in work today.

And then the second issue is what right now you can do about that reality, given that you can't change it tomorrow. So there's this bigger picture. Point here is that we have too many meetings. Why do we have too many meetings? Well, I think there's a couple things going on here, but one of the most important is that we don't have a lot of good systems in place for how we accomplish the work that happens regularly in our teams.

So a meeting becomes a proxy for more well-developed productivity systems. Something falls on your plate. We have to figure out a new strategy for client acquisition. The easiest thing you can do is say, let's get everyone in a meeting. Because now what has happened, you have put something on your calendar, you know everyone will show up, you know you will see it, you know progress will be made.

Because as I say, there's only two productivity systems that every knowledge worker actually absolutely trust they will see, their email inbox and their calendar, so you know you will see that. You know everyone will show up, you'll know some sort of progress is made. The issue is, if there's lots of projects going on, each of which needs to keep making progress, we get a lot of meetings.

Let's all just get together, let's all just talk, and we feel like some sort of progress has been made. So to solve this bigger problem, if we apply the type of solutions I talk about in my book, A World Without Email, where we actually break down the work we do into its constituent processes, and we ask for each, how do we actually want to implement this process?

Where does the information come in? How do we assign and track work? When and how do we talk about this work? What steps can be basically automated? It always happens A, B, and C, and what steps actually need discussion? Can we batch this discussion with other things? Can we have a lot of structure to that discussion?

Can it happen at the same time? When you begin to structure these processes, you get away from just throwing meetings at a problem, which turns out to be just a very high overhead, low effectivity way of actually trying to get things done. So I think that's the big picture solution.

In the small picture, Allison, you're facing a ton of meetings today, and that's not going to change tomorrow. What can you do? There's two things I would recommend. One, add 15 to 30 minutes to the end of every meeting that you schedule. So if someone schedules a half hour meeting, you put aside the full hour.

And what do you do in that second 15 to 30 minutes? That's where you make sense of, organize, act on, and otherwise take action on what was discussed in that meeting. So while it's still fresh in your head, you clarify it. Okay, so what's really going on here? What do I really need to do?

What can I do right now if there's a few small things just to get that done? Is there some big thing I now have to do? Let me figure out maybe when I'm going to do that, get that on my calendar, get this stuff into my systems, make sure that I have full closure on what's happening in that meeting.

There is nothing worse than finishing a meeting that opens up seven or eight loops. And before you can close those loops, you have to jump into another meeting, which generates more loops, which conflicts with them. So add 15 to 30 minutes on the end of every meeting. Now you can get closure cognitively on each of these meetings.

So that's the first thing I would suggest. Two, start scheduling meetings with yourself. Use the same calendar that you use for your other meetings. Treat and respect those meetings like you would any other. Once that time is blocked, that time is blocked. But they are meetings with yourself that you actually use as time dedicated to a specific task that's going to benefit from unbroken concentration.

You probably can't block off all of your time and say, great, seven hours a day, I'm just going to be doing deep work. And there's only 30 minutes left and it's only at this one time. But you can say, I'm going to give myself a two hour meeting today and two one hour meetings on Wednesday.

And these are meetings with myself. So that time is blocked on my calendar. I will not overschedule it with something else. And it makes sure that progress gets done on things that actually require concentration. So those two things, add the 15 to 30 minutes on the end of every meeting schedule to get closure.

Plus, scheduling meetings with yourself for making progress on things that require unbroken concentration. That will release the burden. I'm going to add a bonus suggestion here that I had first brought up in a recent episode. So let me just remind you of this bonus suggestion, which was this notion of one for you, one for me.

Okay, so an issue I talked about, this might have been last week or the week before, an issue I talked about when it came to trying to protect a large amount of your time for no meetings, for unbroken concentration, is that even if you are in a role in which that is reasonable, it's hard to figure out when that time should be in advance.

So let's say, for example, you are in development and four out of eight hours a day, you really should be programming. Sometimes it's hard to say, I'm just going to block off the entire afternoon, because that might be the only time that two out of three people in the executive committee that needs you to meet with them to talk about a new hiring policy.

That's the only time they can meet is the afternoon. And it's actually a real issue if you blocked off in advance the entire afternoon, there's not enough flexibility. If you're going to block off a lot of time, there's not enough flexibility in your schedule to do that in advance.

So the suggestion I gave a couple weeks ago was don't block off that deep work time completely in advance. Do a one for you, one for me strategy. If I book a 90 minute meeting on the Tuesday, at that point, I will then put aside 90 minutes somewhere else in the day for deep work.

And then if someone comes around and says, okay, here's a 30 minute meeting we need to do, great, book that. And at that point, take another 30 minutes somewhere else in the day for your deep work. So you fill in that time for undistracted work throughout the day. As you fill it in with more meetings, you take more and more time.

So you leave more flexibility. All right, so I said I'd give you two suggestions, Allison, but I'm tired of meetings, so I gave you three. Quick summary, add time to your meetings to get closure. Two, at the very least, schedule meetings with yourself. And three, if you want to block off significant amounts of time to be meeting free, instead of doing that all in advance, do the one for you, one for me method.

So you can have more flexibility in scheduling meetings with other people, but still end up with a fair amount of time blocked off.