No Meetings! Another Way to Lead Kindly

A powerful method to empower your team and give them their day(s) back!

Apr 21, 2024

Your engineers need more focus time. Today we will discuss the most useful method I use to give my engineers that secret sauce gurus won’t stop talking about, “flow state”. That method is called a “no meeting day” or “maker day”.

First, why should you care?

Engineers, like all creators, produce their best work in uninterrupted blocks.

This "flow state", or deep work, is where complexity is managed and innovation happens. When an engineer's day is fragmented by meetings, their ability to focus deeply is compromised, leading to a decrease in any output you care about. This is why the concept of "no meeting days" is so useful.

A 30 minute meeting doesn’t just take 30 minutes away from your engineer. For those of us on a manager schedule, it can be easy to forget that the “maker schedule” needs large pockets of work in order to function effectively. A meeting ruins all the context you have in your mind, and it takes time to get that context back once the meeting is over. For engineers that are more introverted, socially anxious, or neurodivergent, meetings can be incredibly expensive. I had a maker describe her day as “completely on hold until my last meeting is done, I’m just completely frozen. Once I’m meeting free, I can relax and get things done.”

In the next sections we will:

Delve into the mechanics of what a "no meeting day" is.
Drool over the potential benefits of a no meeting day for you or your team.
Talk about the downsides and risks of implementing a no meeting day.
I’ll share tips and lessons I’ve learned over the past decade to help you out so you’re not starting from scratch.

What Really is a “Meeting Free Day”?

“Meeting free days” as a practice means that we do not schedule meetings on those days. That’s it. This frees everyone up to spend their day how they wish with much less interruption. No mental load of looming meeting in a few hours, not thinking or rehearsing what to say before standup, and no fear of judgement.

A no meeting day could occur once, or it could happen at different intervals (weekly/monthly/etc). Pinterest Product-Engineering even experimented with 3 no meeting days per week.

Intrigued? Try it for yourself! Pick a day and block the whole day off. Reschedule meetings for another day. Meet with nobody, and use the day to get things done. I recommend committing to try it more than once (since the first few may be a learning exercise if you’re not used to it).

I feel some of you pulling back. “But Coltin, I can’t just cancel and move all my meetings! It’s impossible!”

I hear you. I see you. We are so busy and overwhelmed with meetings, it’s okay if your first reaction was a bit of panic. But let me ask you, what do you do when you’re sick? Or you are on vacation? Do you still attend all your meetings, or do you find a way to make it work? If you’re still doing the meetings, well… we have bigger problems! But if not, then you really have to accept that you are capable of doing more than you thought!

This practice could be something you take on for just yourself, your team, or your organization. Everything’s made up and nothings real, so do what works for you 🤪. But seriously, if nobody is telling you that you can’t, then do it. I, an internet stranger, empower you to take the risk if you so choose.

The Good Stuff

A day with no meetings gives more opportunity for deep work or entering a flow state. This is critical for individual contributors (ICs), and if you’re a leader you should be empowering ICs to have as much flow as possible.
3-4 meetings in a row can be stressful, but much less disruptive for a maker schedule. Compare! Ask yourself which day you prefer. Meeting free days are more likely to create days with bundled vs sparse meetings.
Managers may not care, but engineers almost always prefer the left.
Reduces stress. Meeting free days give makers an entire day where the only concern is the work. They don’t need to worry about their camera, showing up somewhere on time, what they will say, any sort of prep, judgement of any kind, and if they work from home, wearing pants 👖.
Folks can work from more places. Even when I worked in the San Francisco Yelp office, I would spend more time during no meeting days away from my desk. I’d wander to other floors and find a couch or hidden away nook and work. I felt much less chained to my desk when I had no more meetings. I once worked half the day outside in a park!
If you work across many timezones, no meeting days can provide some much needed respite for folks who sometimes need to come in to work earlier or stay later than they’d like to make across-the-world meetings work.
Meetings that occur during the week may be more intentional once you have an established no-meeting day. If you limit the amount of time people can meet, they are forced to evaluate the value of the meeting. Imagine if your company only had 4 hours a week where people were allowed to schedule meetings; only the most important meetings would survive. No meeting days are a less extreme version of that idea.

The Hard Stuff

It’s not all upswing.

Look at any week where there is a holiday. There will be no meetings for the company on that day because nobody is working, but look how the meetings squeeze into the rest of the week. Ouch! Some become asynchronous updates, especially since it’s a one off (we will meet next week when there is no holiday), but some meetings are sticky; they want to persist and find any space to fill.

Implementing a no-meeting weekly practice doesn’t make the need to communicate go away. It can force some better meeting hygiene, such as moving some meetings to an email or slack message, but even that has a cost. Make sure people understand the practice, follow it, and ensure everyone is getting what they need. It can be hard!

Not to mention the holiday squeeze gets even tighter if you have an established no meeting day (now 3 days to meet!). I personally make exceptions on short weeks and will schedule some meetings on the no-meeting day. A personal preference that makes me not a purist, but it’s a tradeoff you need to weigh for yourself and your team.

There are difficult challenges to balance with no single correct answer. If two people mutually want to meet on a no meeting day, should you as a leader prevent them from meeting on no meeting day? If so, are you able to tell the difference between two people wanting to meet, and one person being pushy and the other people pleasing? I’m sure my engineers would say it’s fine if their 2nd level manager scheduled a meeting on no-meeting day. We’re all adults and maybe you lean into that, but I’ll point out that any meetings on that day will make it easier for others to schedule meetings. It is a slippery slope. What you allow will continue, etc etc. Be clear on where you allow flexibility, and where you need to be rigid.

Lastly, while we have no-meeting Wednesdays in Yelp engineering, the rest of the company is not necessarily bought into this. How strict you want to be when the PR team wants to meet with you on no-meeting Wednesday is up to you. When folks see your no-meeting day they see open field where everyone is mutually free. That is so rare if you want to meet with a bunch of managers because it’s likely the only day not crammed full of meetings for everyone!

Tips and Tricks for a Successful No Meeting Day

Try eliminating meetings first. There is a lot we can say about good meeting hygiene that we won’t cover today. You an ask yourself these questions as a place to start:

Do I understand the purpose of the meeting? If not, should I be attending?
Is the meeting still serving its purpose? Are we still attending just because it’s on the calendar?
Could it be an email or slack update instead?
Can I send someone else in my place, who could learn more and represent the team or myself?
- This can be a very useful coaching opportunity and free up your time!
- Make sure this is something you can actually delegate and you’re not actually playing hot potato.

You can review your engineers meetings and help them make the same evaluations. If you empower them to say no to meetings, you are making them way more effective, and scaling yourself more. Just make sure they are still attending impactful meetings and aren’t going too far the opposite direction.

If you practice a daily standup, then on the no meeting day we do it offline. People can add their status update to a doc or slack channel instead. The team should be expected to check this document or channel, but they can do so when it’s convenient for them.

Frequency is important and there is no perfect answer. For me, having 1 day a week where I won’t have any meetings is so nice and is what I recommend. If you’re trying it out, you could do bi-weekly to compare which weeks you like better.

Consider how you want to handle shorter weeks where holidays squeeze the schedule. Do you find it better to take away the maker day (no meeting day), or have the other days squeeze even more?

As a manager, it’s critical to reschedule your 1:1s that fall on holidays. Don’t ask your direct report if they still want to meet, just reschedule it. Let them cancel it if they really want to, but especially on these “squeeze weeks” it sends an important message that you are here to make time for them, even when it’s hard.

No meeting days are an incredible practice that all engineering organizations should employ in my opinion. If you don’t have the influence to make this happen (yet) in your organization, I would implore you to at least make this happen for your team, as best you can. This can be more challenging because external stakeholders / teams / people will try to schedule during this time. Even at Yelp I combat this by adding a “no meeting” meeting to my calendar, which discourages people from scheduling. Some tools will search for mutual empty space, and this will block those as well!

Remember the value you want to drive with the no meeting day, and focus on that. This likely isn’t the only tool you can use to achieve that goal (even if it is a powerful one). If you keep that in mind, it will help you influence towards the existence of the no meeting day, and more importantly help you resolve the tricky situations that might come up.

If you’re having trouble influencing no meeting days into existence, feel free to reach out or send people this article

Closing Remarks

I hope there was something of value for you here, and if you have any questions or want to pick my brain please do!

Lead Kindly