Protip: Start observing a No-meeting day. Even better if the whole team buys into it. For a few weeks, send out reminders to other teams you collaborate with t

Protip: Start observing a No-meeting day. Even better if the whole team buys into it. For a few weeks, send out reminders to other teams you collaborate with that "X is no meeting day for the team, we'd appreciate your understanding". If anyone schedules something on X day, politely ask for it to be rescheduled to a different day. For the first few weeks it'll be hard, esp. because there'll be a lot of last minute meetings, or planned meetings with members from different teams but after the initial hiccups you more or less have an entire day every week to focus on what you want to focus on and that is a crazy productivity multiplier. A nice side-effect is that it has led to better asynchronous processes as well (eg. people write much more instead of making decisions during a meeting with the whole team etc.) In my team, we initially started it off with "No team meetings on Wednesdays", but pretty soon team members realized how freeing it is to have no meetings at all for an entire day, so we started avoiding even personal meetings on Wednesday. Fairly soon, other teams saw the productivity gains we were getting and also started observing the same on Wednesdays. Slowly, we're considering to having no meetings on 2 days a week (Wednesday was an easy choice because of it's location in the week, finding the second day is harder), esp now that other teams also adopted Wednesday. With Covid, specifically for people working at companies like mine which thrived in a non-remote environment, the need for everything to be done/decided in meetings and an unsubstantiated FOMO has crept into most of our lives. And we really need to start trying to fix that through process rather than pushing everyone into a trench of non-productive but up-to-speed.