Stuck in Meetings All Day? Your Team May Be Broken (And How to Fix It)

Well, which was the one that surprised you the most?

We asked in our survey about productivity tips.

So this, I think, gets at the heart of what this show is about.

How do you get more done? So we assumed, this is me naively assuming, that the more productivity tips these people are incorporating, the more productive their team would become.

So we asked them about things like, do you turn off your email and only check it a few times a day? Do you turn off your notifications? Do you keep your phone in the other room for hours at a time so that you can just get your most important work done? And as it turns out, those behaviors do not predict a high-performing team.

So for me, that was stunning.

Why is that? Why wouldn't a group of individuals who are individually more productive than most not yield a most more productive team? And the answer is because when I unilaterally decide that I'm not going to be available between 10 and 12, and you unilaterally decide that you're not available between 12 and 2, we've created bottlenecks for one another.

And so I say in the book, one person's deep work becomes another person's bottleneck.

And so what does that tell us? What it tells us is what the best teams do differently is they collaborate as a group and determine for themselves, OK, we're going to create dedicated focus blocks when everyone can be off email and everyone can stay out of meetings.

And then we're going to set different blocks of hours when we're all going to be in meetings and all going to be available on email.

And that allows people to do their best work without having to be constantly distracted and toggle back and forth.

I think we wrote about that very briefly, manager versus maker time and the one thing.

So it's not like they're not doing those things because there's a lot of research that shows like the farther away your phone is from you, like the higher your relative IQ is going to be, right? You're not distracted, all of those things, but they're not isolating themselves for their team because the core of a team is we do it together and it's hard to do it together if we can't communicate.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

And I think it also speaks to, and by the way, just to give a little bit of color to this.

So on high performing teams, they're 50% better at avoiding unnecessary meetings.

They're 54% less likely to schedule recurring meetings.

And so they're trying to excavate themselves out of these constant meetings.

And the average worker spends 18 hours a week in meetings and 11 hours digging themselves out of messages.

And so what does that leave for real work? It's about a day.

What happens when you have to cram a week's worth of work into a single day? This is when you look to create more time.

You come in early, you stay late, you work weekends, and no wonder people are getting burnt out.

A better question is, how are people getting any work done in the first place when they're constantly being distracted by meeting and messages? I think the key insight for me when I take away how we apply this is that you really can't be a high performer on an underperforming team.

I think for so long, we as productivity writers, we've thought about how do we create individuals who are more productive.