In the course of a five day work week (if I am lucky), these are a variety of meetings that fill up my time at the office. There are days when I go into a meeting of one type or another at 8AM (or earlier) and wrap up my meeting filled agenda at 5PM (or later).

I’d like to say I have all of these meetings because I am an essential cog in the meeting wheel but that would be a fib. It’s more to do with the fact that meetings are now simply what you do when you work in corporate America (or Europe or Asia or anywhere else on planet Earth). Somewhere along the way I must have missed the meeting that stated we would be having more meetings. I probably had a schedule conflict and had to make the decision that the other meeting was more important than the meeting about meetings.

I think that the dramatic increase in meetings is partially due to the more open and collaborative nature of work. More and more corporations are trying to embrace social business, innovation and collaboration. That’s the good news.

The bad news is all that collaboration and openness demands more meetings. Yes, companies are trying collaborative services or portals to help collaborate and innovate across enterprise silos but there are still endless opportunities for meetings (in person, teleconference, webconference, video conference, whatever).

So a week ago, I scheduled a meeting with myself and sat down to talk about meetings. Or more specifically how to manage my participation in the endless onslaught of meetings. Me, myself and I came to a meeting of the minds and came up with an experiment that is currently in it’s second week of implementation.

My normal routine is that first thing on Monday morning, I go through the meeting invites and other meeting related emails that hit over the weekend. I update my calendar and see what the week looks like. Invariably there’s a day or two that ends up being meeting free that week so I immediately block those days on my calendar and do my best to not schedule any meetings on those days. Any meetings that crop up during the week either get scheduled on days when I already have meetings or scheduled for the following week.

The second thing I do is try and cut down on the unscheduled meetings that crop up throughout the week. You know those meetings. The ones that start with the comment: “Do you have a few minutes to discuss…?” I handle these requests by asking the requester to schedule some time on my calendar. Everyone in my company can see my available/unavailable time on my calendar because I am relentless in keeping it up to date. This practice actually serves three purposes:

(1) It makes the person looking for my time to focus their thoughts and prepare for the discussion.

(2) It lets me prepare for the discussion.

(3) It lets me keep my meeting free days actually meeting-free.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: These practices aren’t cutting down on the number of meetings in the week, so how can this possibly be helping me get things done? I’ll enlighten you right now…

(1) I schedule every meeting for a minimum of an hour. Even the meetings that really only go 20 or 30 minutes get blocked on my calendar for an hour. This allows me to prepare, digest and maybe even work on the action items that come out of the meeting. At a minimum it gives me time to update my to-do and priority lists.

(2) If I know that Monday, Tuesday and Thursday are the days that I have meetings then I plan my administrative type tasks for those days. Expense reports, returning phone calls or emails, status reports, etc. are all things that can be dealt with in between meetings.

Alternatively, if I know that Wednesday and Friday are the days that I have designated as meeting-free, then I know those are the days when I’ll be able to focus on long term projects or strategic work. I can spend my time working without having to watch the time.

(3) By asking people to schedule time with me on my calendar, I have found that one of two things happen:

(a) The requester focuses the discussion so that the meeting is productive and on topic, or

(b) The requester realizes they don’t really need to involve me in the discussion and I’ve avoided an unnecessary meeting for both of us.

According to an article on LeadershipNow.com (Information overload and what you can do about it, July 20, 2011), a 30-second interruption can result in as much as 5 minutes of recovery time. In total, interruptions plus recovery time consume as much as 28% of the knowledge worker’s day. By grouping meetings on the same day and leaving entire days free from meetings, I’m hoping to not only cut down on the interruption/recovery time statistics but also beat the findings of a 2010 Basex study that knowledge workers spend only 5% of the day engaged in thought and reflection.

None of this eliminates emergency meetings – not much at all you can do about those. Fire happens and sometimes you’re the only one holding a bucket of water. In the first week of the experiment, I ended up scheduling one meeting on one of my blocked off, meeting-free days. That’s actually not bad and I didn’t let it throw me off course with the experiment.

What do you do to do deal with the relentless stream of meetings in your life? I’d love to hear what others are doing to streamline and manage meetings while still doing your job and enjoying your life.