Women Who Do This 1 Thing Between Back-to-Back Meetings Are Seen as More Productive

Back-to-back meetings may seem like a great way to knock off a bunch of your agenda items within a few hours. But in reality, you’re getting a lot of information thrown your way, with very little, or absolutely no time at all to process it. 

Back-to-back meetings fill our calendars and leave us with fewer hours to actually get the work done. We don’t have time to write that email, follow up with that action item or even grab a quick lunch. We leave our offices or close our laptops feeling exhausted and burnt out. 

Successful women who don’t want back-to-back meetings to wreck their productivity—or their work-life balance—change their default meeting times.

Instead of setting a meeting for an hour or 30 minutes, send invites for 50 or 25-minute meetings. 

These five to ten minutes can have a big impact on not only your productivity but your team and coworkers’ productivity, too.

3 Ways Changing Your Default Meeting Times Makes You More Productive.

1. Your meetings become focused.

If your team knows you have a little less time on a call, you’ll all be working just that much harder to ensure everything that needs to get covered gets its time before the meeting ends. The small change in time ensures that there’s still enough time to get everything done while forcing everyone involved to be slightly more dialed in.

2. You have time to follow up.

When your meetings blend right into one another, you don’t have any time to take any preliminary follow-up actions once each meeting ends. With a few spare minutes, you can take a second to organize yourself and figure out when you’ll be able to execute on what was just discussed—while it’s fresh in your head.

3. You can take a moment to breathe.

Following up is important, but so is taking that extra moment to breathe and rest. With an extra five to ten minutes, you can take that bathroom break, get that glass of water or go outside for a quick walk up and down your street. These little moments add up and can help alleviate some of the stress, fatigue and exhaustion that come with a day of back-to-back meetings.