Maximize Your Meetings: Establish Meeting Days & Stick to Them

For busy CEOs, especially in this post-pandemic space, handling meetings (both in-person and virtual) is becoming a much-needed skill. If you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself spending more time in meetings, than working on the business. To avoid this from happening, it’s important to take control of your meetings and limit them to certain days during the week. In this way you’re much more prepared to be fully present during your meetings and not have to worry about juggling meetings with mission-critical tasks that must be completed. CEO Advisory groups often recommend reserving Mondays and Fridays as meeting days and Tuesdays through Thursdays as “execution” days devoted to getting strategic work done. Here are three reasons why having meeting days can help you maximize your time and minimize your distractions.

1. Less mental ‘switching’. It can be very hard to switch from completing a task to attending a meeting without losing time during the transition. Researchers have found that it takes almost 24 minutes to mentally get back into a task once you’ve been away from it for more than an hour. So, imagine if you’re constantly pulled away from strategic tasks to attend meetings, only to struggle to get back into your “flow” and complete these tasks before the next meeting or distraction arises. When you can dedicate full workdays, you dramatically decrease the transition times and can get more done, in less time.

2. More time to focus on execution and getting results. Meetings are important to review, move things along, or to arrive at a consensus of what to do next. However, the action as a result of the meeting has to take place at some point. By reserving the middle of the week for execution, you’re able to leverage the bulk of the week for strategy, research, and briefly connecting with key stakeholders that may not be available during other times.

3. Better insight for planning and prioritizing. Although meetings on Mondays and Fridays may not be the most ideal days, they are very important to help you plan your week and top priorities. When you meet on Mondays, you have a better idea of the most pressing issues that you need to address for the week, and you then have the entire week to get the work done. When you meet on Fridays, though action may not be taken immediately, it empowers you to start to forecast what is important to tackle the next week, so that everyone has their marching orders well in advance.

If you find that you need to reserve more than two meeting days per week, then it is time to re-evaluate why you are meeting in the first place. Could you improve communication to reduce issues or confusion? Is it necessary to set shorter check-in points in lieu of recurring meeting times? Are there processes that need to be improved to reduce the number of meeting times required?

The key is to help you pinpoint when you need to meet and regulate those meetings to specific days so you have more time to focus on revenue-generating tasks without interruptions.