Meeting Free Weeks
Inspired by Heidi’s proposal (World View on this in Nature), the Huang lab, with other ATGU labs, has the following meeting free week policy.
Ever feel like you can’t get any work done because you are in too many meetings and phone calls? We feel it too and have now launched “meeting free weeks” to combat this. A week without interruption means a week of productivity. We aim to do meeting free weeks once per quarter, trying to avoid major genomics meetings and also alternating which week of the month we hit to avoid interrupting the same monthly meetings. Below is the schedule for the next year:
May 25-29 – 4th week
August 3-7 – 1st week
November 16-20 – 3rd week
Guidance for implementing meeting free weeks:
Plan ahead! Block the weeks on your calendar now and start moving or canceling meetings per guidance here
- Cancel weekly meetings and don’t schedule new meetings in these weeks
- Reschedule monthly meetings to a different week (or cancel) – schedule alternates 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th weeks so monthly meetings are only disrupted 1X/year
- For already scheduled meetings, try to move them if possible, but it’s OK to keep difficult-to-schedule meetings
- Once the week arrives, ad hoc meetings are allowed at the discretion of the supervisor/team leads, to accomplish work planned for the meeting free week x
- A nice write-up about meeting free weeks is here: How to Implement a Meeting-Free Week at Your Company
More info: http://broad.io/MeetingFreeWeek
