Distributed workers collaborate almost entirely through technology, mainly video calls, email, calendars and Slack. One enterprise software company encouraged a monthly meeting-free week. Leaders discouraged meetings but did not ban them. Researchers asked the workers what they did with that time, and how they got each other’s attention when the calendar was clear. The answer was more complicated than “more focus.”
What the study did
The researchers interviewed 17 distributed workers at the company in June and July 2023 about their most recent meeting-free week.[1] A follow-up study with 11 workers looked at attention negotiation: how workers got a colleague’s response, and how they protected their own focus.[1] The company had run meeting-free weeks since June 2021.[2] This is one organization, not a survey of workplaces.
Three ways people used the cleared time
- Focus. People with heavy meeting loads used the open time to finish core work they had kept postponing.[1]
- Collaborative. For people whose work happens inside meetings, such as product and people managers, the change was, for some participants, in the type of meeting, not the number. Some wondered whether the week applied to them at all.[1]
- Time-bound. Engineers handling urgent escalations or weekly deployments got a few hours back. Meetings were never their biggest barrier to focus.[1]
The hard part: getting attention without a meeting
Without scheduled calls as the default, workers had to reach each other another way. They chose a channel (a direct message, a team channel or a call), flagged urgency, and escalated if nobody answered. To protect their focus, they turned off notifications and sorted incoming requests.[1]
Those two sides pulled against each other. The study describes tensions between them, and workers used those tensions to explain why more meetings were needed.[1]
Questions worth asking on your team
The study doesn’t test these. They are questions the findings raise, not recommendations it makes.
- Is there one agreed channel for urgent requests, and one path if nobody answers?
- Which roles work inside meetings? They may need different rules than a blanket block.
- Did the meetings go away, or did the same conversations move somewhere else? Did the work get easier?
What the study does not show
It studied one company that had run meeting-free weeks since June 2021, using interviews. It recorded workers’ own accounts of their productivity and well-being. It did not measure either objectively, so it cannot say whether meeting-free weeks improve them. Other companies, industries and tools may work differently.
The study’s main concern is how people reach each other once meetings are gone. A team that tries a meeting-free week could track that as well as the number of meetings cut, though the study does not test it.
References
[1] Ferguson SA, Massimi M. Circle Back Next Week: The Effect of Meeting-Free Weeks on Distributed Workers’ Unstructured Time and Attention Negotiation. Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24), 2024. DOI: 10.1145/3613904.3642175. Finding: 17 interviews (June-July 2023) about participants’ most recent meeting-free week, on three orientations (Focus, Collaborative, Time-Bound); attention-getting strategies (channel, urgency, escalation) and attention-delegation strategies (protecting focus, triaging requests), with tensions between them. ↑︎ a b c d e f g
[2] Ferguson SA, Massimi M. Circle Back Next Week (preprint). arXiv:2404.00161, 2024. Preprint of [1], not the peer-reviewed version; CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Finding: meeting-free weeks began June 2021 at one organization (Section 3.1); the authors note the study covers one organization, which limits generalisability (Section 6). arxiv.org/abs/2404.00161. ↑︎
Sourcing note: this summary is based on the full text of the arXiv preprint of the study (arXiv:2404.00161), which carries the same title, conference and DOI as the CHI ’24 version. Other studies on meetings were not included.
Kurt Greiner
Kurt is a digital strategist and IT professional blending emerging technology with practical application, exploring how individuals can leverage modern tools to navigate the second half of life with purpose.
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