A recent post in the Journal titled “Is It Ever OK to Have an 8 a.m. Meeting?”1 got me thinking. Now, I’m not going to quote from any study or point you to some paper that backs up my habits. I’m simply going to tell you that even as an early bird and as someone who generally stays after 5pm, I won’t schedule 8am meetings. Or 4pm meetings. Or Friday meetings. And I’d rather we didn’t meet on Tuesdays, either.
Some of this comes from working a few jobs that offered flextime and thrived on Teams and Zoom. Your “first-thing Monday” might flexibly mean 9am or even 10am. And likewise, your “end of day” might well mean after I’m done washing the dinner dishes.
If you’re working during these these two hours, gauge your energy and attention levels and use that time appropriately. One person I know uses the 8am hour to plan out their day and tackle the shorter “just do it” tasks that can accumulate if not planned. Another colleague takes the 4pm hour to review the day, collect unfinished work and prepare for the morrow.
At one gig, we quietly circulated the notion in our department that, barring an emergency, none of us would ever schedule a Friday meeting. It was an unwritten rule,2 but we generally kept it without comment, so much so, that new people sometimes had to have this workplace habit explained.
It’s a delight to say “I’m sorry, I don’t take Friday meetings” during a vendor call and tell them that we used meeting-free Fridays to get work done. I’ve never experienced any pushback and most vendors merely seemed jealous.
And why Tuesdays? Many times it seems that Monday meetings are unavoidably necessary. And Thursday is too close to meeting-free-Friday, so Tuesday or Wednesday might work. Block if off. Plan it out. Schedule your week’s work so that the kind of projects that require a solid block of time can be done on these days.
Whatever works for you and your workplace, be intentional. And flexible. If something you’ve tried doesn’t work, figure out why and try something different—there are as many ways of working a week as there are people. You’ll find something.
- Alcántara, A.-M. (2024, February 25). Is it ever OK to have an 8 a.m. Meeting?. Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/workplace/is-it-ever-ok-to-have-an-8-a-m-meeting-fb04fe2d?st=pg6wb7ljwiewvjd&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink ↩︎
- Actually, it was written down, along with a number of other tongue-in-cheek “rules” to work by. ↩︎
