The perfect work week

Image by www_slon_pics from Pixabay

After Covid, many of us have realized how much time we save by not travelling to various meetings. However, is it possible that we are now having more meetings instead? And perhaps they aren’t as disciplined? Yesterday I had a conversation with an architect and we both felt that some weeks there are so many meetings that it is difficult to clock in any productive work at all. In our conversation we did some brainstorming and came up with an idea that might work. What if there was an industry standard within civil engineering that looked something like this: Mondays – Internal meetings, Tuesdays – Client meetings, Wednesdays – Productive work, Thursdays – Client meetings and Fridays – Productive work again. Imagine how much easier it would be to focus and to optimize scheduling.

Monday

Everybody needs to do internal meetings. It would be a great start of a new work week to begin with why we are working. When the tyranny of the urgent strikes, internal meetings and long term planning is usually the first sheep sent to the slaughter. Because we can postpone them until later. Usually, later never comes. This is somewhat paradoxical, because the hours spent on long term strategical meetings might look as a red minus sign on the time card, but in the long term, the value of those hours are incalculable. It is very unwise to not work on your “why”.

Tuesday

This is the meeting day. We could divide the day into let’s say four slots, two in the morning and two after lunch. An effective meeting should not last longer than 1,5-2,0 hours, with a short five-minute break in the middle. No one can stay focused for that long anyway. I know that from my lecturing. And from my days as a sleepy student…

Wednesday

Today it is not allowed to schedule meetings. This is the day where people get their hands dirty and do some productive work. Short technical/project meetings are fine of course because they count as productive work. But no meetings of that kind where you mostly listen. By knowing that Wednesdays are a “sacred day” when you can get things done, it will be much easier to plan and do resource allocation.

Thursday

Same thing goes for the meetings. If everyone knew that there are only eight meeting slots in a week, and acted accordingly, planning and scheduling would be a breeze compared to how it can be today. As a musician and an artist, I have learned that one of the best ways to boost creativity is by introducing constraints and limitations. The more options we have, the more time we spend thinking about what we should do. Introduce adequate boundary conditions and you will likely notice that your life becomes 10X easier. Especially with critical, life changing decisions.

Friday

Another sacred day where you can execute and deliver on your commitments. And the last thing you do before you go home for the weekend is to scribble down three critical things that you should attend to when you get back on Monday next week. Preferably, the last thing you do before you turn off the lights each day is to write down those three critical things that you will attend to tomorrow, no matter what happens.

The above schedule is just a proposition and might need some tweaking, but I am pretty sure that if the civil engineering sector could agree on something like the above, we would see an increase in productivity. A tremendous increase. If we at least could agree on certain time slots in a week which are strictly forbidden to book meetings, that would be a good start.

What do you think?