Meeting in the Middle: What Do You Do When Everyone’s Meeting Preferences are Different?

A little while ago someone reached out to me to connect—and you know what happened next. We tried to find a day and time to meet.?

The problem was she batched all her meetings on Fridays, which happens to be my meeting-free day.?

Both of us had been designating entire days that are free of meetings. Meeting-free days mean time for deep focus and making progress on complex or long-term projects. Recent research published in MIT Sloan Management Review revealed that having meeting-free days had a positive impact across outcomes like autonomy, collaboration, and productivity, and decreased micromanagement and stress.

As more companies permit and encourage employees to take ownership of their schedules, including designating certain days of the week free from live meetings, it’s going to become fairly common to run into a problem like mine. Everyone has different preferences for which day should be meeting-free? and even what time of day they prefer to meet (I prefer to meet in the afternoon my time, for instance, whereas others prefer to meet in the morning). It gets even more complicated the more people you are trying to bring in. Say you’re trying to get together with four colleagues—and every single one has a different meeting-free day. Some may even have more than one meeting-free day. What do you do??

Align on Team Meeting Norms?

If you’re establishing meeting boundaries as a team, prevent this situation from occurring by setting some common expectations about core meeting hours as well as meeting-free days. If possible, have the same meeting-free days as the team members you collaborate with the most.?

Additionally, establish and maintain norms around how to schedule and hold effective virtual meetings—e.g., sending agendas, incorporating async prework and postwork.?

If you haven’t yet set these norms, or you’re collaborating with people who are outside your team or organization, and you need to coordinate something now, you’ll need to take a different approach.?

Options for Coordinating Different Meeting-Free Preferences:?

Re-think your needs

Is a meeting truly necessary to accomplish your goal? Have you thought about accomplishing the task at hand in another way, like sending video updates or contributing ideas asynchronously to a virtual whiteboard? Do you need a full hour of others’ time, or can 15 minutes be enough, or even just 5 minutes? Does it need to be a video call, or can you connect by phone??

Wait to meet until schedules change

If you don’t need to meet right away, you might consider waiting until schedules change. For instance, one week someone might already have adjusted their meeting-free days to accommodate additional meetings. If you do wait, what might you be able to accomplish before the live discussion??

At least one person makes an exception to their no-meeting boundary

If you determine that the meeting is absolutely necessary, and it has to happen in a timely manner, then someone is going to have to make an exception to their meeting-free practice.? If there is a good chance this won’t be the only meeting between these parties, it may help to take turns when it comes to making exceptions. It’s important here to make sure that the same person (or group of people) are not always the ones who have to make exceptions to their meeting-free days.??

Don’t meet at all

Yes, this is absolutely an option! Especially if you determine from re-thinking your needs that you can accomplish the purpose of the meeting in some other way. Not meeting doesn’t mean that work isn’t getting done. It can mean that work is getting done asynchronously, or it might mean that the meeting in question is simply not a priority at this time.?

Meeting-free days can have a significant positive impact on individual as well as team outcomes, but it definitely does add complexity to scheduling. However, by establishing team norms, or by choosing one of the other options above, coordinating schedules doesn’t have to be impossible.?

So what ended up happening with the person I was trying to meet with? In our case, we ended up just not meeting because it just wasn’t a priority at that time. And guess what? Life, and work, went on.?