Most of the senior leaders in any sizable company jump around slots of 30 min to few-hour meetings on a good day. That can range from meeting with customers, team reviews, re-occurring tactical meetings, 1:1s, or tech architecture. In my experience, this gets increased and more split-focused the bigger the organization you manage or you are navigating in.

Some are able to do very different setups, most notably Tobi Lütke from Shopify, who did experiments on killing off “Shopify Recurring Meetings” which is interesting experiment and a very good overall article.

Here is a list of examples of things that worked for me and they might work for you:

1. Bundle it up

The constant context switch is part of the job for most leaders. If you manage to keep the type of activity similar for a longer period of time it will have less impact on your cognitive load and energy level. This is why focused coding or longer whiteboard session is not tiring. This is the template I use for trying to move my meetings around. , this is not always possible since for example customer meetings need time flexibility so do random fires. I might need to do early pickup at the school or dependency on peers in the company that won’t fit. That said lot of the meetings can transform to look like this.

The way I arrive at the template is:

1. Look at the last few weeks of calendar data
2. Consider the monthly/bi-weekly/weekly ones
3. Reshuffle or put block times for larger project work
4. Color code the slots by some criteria that makes sense in your case
5. Bundle similar types of tasks one after another.
6. Use the template as a baseline for shuffling things around.

Bundling similar type of tasks one after another helps with general cognitive load by reducing the context switch. 1:1 put on the same day makes the meetings with less mental load. While each 1:1 is with differnt employees the type of activity is similar. The alternative of having one customer meeting and then architecture and then project work.

In my case, the meeting ends up being primarly focused on People and Customer/Project work

You can do the grouping in a way that makes sense to you

An important aspect when doing the bundling is to consider the energy-draining activity. If time reports are a pain, leave for the end of the day or have activity that you know will get you excited right after.

2. Using Block and focus time

The idea is simple really having slots of 30 min here and there is not enough for focused work so instead, you try to block some time for specific work. This would decide your day into blocks, such as “external meetings”, “email”, “interviews” and “project work”.

This has helped quite a bit at getting focus time on most weeks while navigating amongst the fires.

3. Say no

You can say no. This might sound controversial but ruthless prioritization is how things get done. The default answer of saying yes is not a long-term strategy. Yes mode can kill your productivity and it’s so easy to do especially in larger organizaitons.

One lighter step before saying no is asking the other side to provide agenda or a proper pre-read doc if your position allows that.

Often the meeting ends up in a redirect. When asking the other side to write a pre-read creates clarity of thought and makes it 2x faster the decision process.

4. Don’t just respond right away

Well, I am a bit guilty here myself but it’s easy to get drowned in smaller messages and defocus both in meetings and in regular work. During in-person meetings, I try to bring a physical paper notebook with meet and take notes the old-fashioned way. This stops the distractions that might happen via laptop, phone, slack, etc.

Nowadays in the remote way of working, it’s getting harder but I do try to divide time during the day and put in “unproductive time” for slack and email.