Absolutely, Kelly! I love the idea of "No Meeting Day".

However, I've found what works best for me is spreading out these "no meeting" times across the week. I book them on my calendar, and folks just schedule around them.

Having a few hours every week in your schedule to tackle your next actions without interruption goes such a long way, doesn't it?

Why not take a phone or computer away for a day? Meetings are just another tool to get the job done. Why would a company want to take away tools? Is it just because most people don't know how to use them? Yes. It would be better to take one day and teach everyone how to use the the tool correctly - for everyone's benefit.

Oh, and yes I say 'No'.

I work for a chemical plant and interface with 5 different manufacturing teams. We are always telling each other that we have too many meetings. I typically attend about 15 meetings/wk averaging about 1.5 hrs each.

When I think about it, my gripe is not that we are having too MANY meetings, it is that we are spending too much TIME in the meetings. I realize that I really do need to attend 15 meetings a week in order to interface with the various groups and project teams, but I think that if we did a better job of preparing, showing up on time, and staying on task, we could get our "group work" done faster and leave more time for our "solo work".

Let's all try to maintain high standards of professionalism and to respect our co-workers' time by doing our best to run efficient meetings. "So, what's the next action?" can be a reliable phrase to re-focus the discussion on why you came together.

Being an entrepreneur that works from home, I don't have a lot of "meetings", but I do have band rehearsals, soccer practices, music lessons, dr. appointments and errands to run on a weekly basis. I try to schedule as many of these events on the same day as possible and leave at least 3 days a week where I have a solid 8am - 3pm block of time to myself to draw or write. I find that my creative work suffers when I am in and out of my office too much in short little bursts. I am learning to say no or reschedule when it doesn't fit my groove for the week.

I'm definitely one of those people who have to fit in real work around the meetings, since I work in a senior individual contributor capacity. I probably average 10 hours a week in meetings of one sort or another. Most of those are actually phone meetings rather than face-to-face.

Much more than about 10 hrs of meetings (2hrs/day) and I start to feel I'm not getting enough time to fit the work in; much less than that and I feel like I'm not communicating enough about what I'm doing or need to be doing.

Andy

My workplace is meeting driven, many times meetings happen for the sake of meetings also to provide an opportunity to travel to other location. How are you defining meetings here? Formal meetings, team meetings, coffee corner meetings? All of them tend to build up and take a big chunk out of the working day. If we could get our work done without having to communicate with other people then this would be GREAT. But then would there be a reason/need to leave home?

I thought about this very issue yesterday, in between a string of 7 meetings. In one day.

Two of the meetings added value. The other 5 could have been covered by a memo...they only transmitted information.

The Zero Meeting Day IS useful, if for no other reason than shock value. I like it!!

Peter Drucker wrote an outstanding article on how to run productive meetings in HBR about 6 years ago...I still have it. If you'd like it, email me.

I had a lot of meetings. I'm in sales so that's one of the instruments I use. But I mentioned that having more then 3-4 meetings a day makes me very tired. So I try to limit them to that numbers. That's allows me to have time for processing at the end of the day and doing predefined work.

How about no e-mail days? I've heard about some companies doing this. What do you think of this?

No email? Wow, what would I do for mental snacking? I bet you people would have a harder time letting go of email than meetings.