for project management: * 15-30 minute ticket calls every day at 8am. very quick run-through of who is assigned what and are there any blockers? very occasi

for project management: * 15-30 minute ticket calls every day at 8am. very quick run-through of who is assigned what and are there any blockers? very occasionally this call will extend to 45 minutes because of some exceptional issue but usually is significantly less than 30 mins. 8am and 8pm pacific time are a global scheduling 'anchor' slots we use for us/europe and us/asia. * long term projects get 30 minutes per week at the same time and day, usually monday or tuesday. as deadlines approach, we add thursday or fridays so twice a week. * at the beginning of every meeting i state the agenda, usually broken into 3 phases: timeline review, action items review and preview, and Q&A. * 'visionary' or 'general discussion' meetings take an hour or more and are planned as such. it's not uncommon for architects and executives to block out 2 hours for such discussions (we have a remote team). for business development: * never schedule anything on a monday or friday unless specifically requested for a good reason. these are 'catch up' days for sales and marketing people to get busy-work done or organize their data or send emails. * lunch meetings are fine but it's not any more likely to result in anything positive. we usually use these only when we can't fit it in elsewhere and the person is local and the team wants to eat somewhere nice. * sales review / strategy meetings can take 2-3 hours and we usually plan these at the very end of the day on Tue or Thurs when customer calls are finished. everyone goes home afterwards and there's at least one day left in the week to actually start executing.