Back in high school, my days were broken up into several class periods. At the end of a period, the bell rang, signaling the time to transition to the next class. If I remember correctly, I had about 7 or 8 minutes to travel to my next class, use the restroom, swap books at my locker, and say “hi” to my band-geek friends. When the bell rang a second time, I was expected to be sitting at my desk at my next class with the right textbook ready to go. There wasn’t a lot of transition time, but there was enough.

Our modern work environment looks quite a bit different. The default unit of measure for modern meetings is 30-minute increments. Most of my meetings are 30 minutes. However, some are 60, and a few are 90 minutes long.

From 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM, I have 18 distinct schedulable units on my calendar. I don’t leave all of those time slots available, I block some of them off for desk time and other tasks, as I described in this article.

The problem isn’t that I could potentially have 18 30-minute meetings in one day. That’s a different issue for another day. The problem is that each meeting starts at the top of the hour, ends at the bottom of the hour at the simultaneous moment that the next meeting is supposed to start.

The norm is to use all of the meeting time and allow no time for transition. If you need time to transition, you are leaving your current meeting early, or showing up at your next meeting late. Occasionally, a meeting organizer will intentionally end the meeting early to “give time back” but that is a generous exception, not the rule.

So, we spend all day going from meeting to meeting without any transitions. This creates two problems: First, our brains don’t have any time to shift from one subject to the next. That shift still needs to happen, so it will automatically make the last bit of the previous meeting and the first bit of the next meeting unproductive.

The second problem is stress. Occasionally, if for no other reason than needing the restroom, we will take transition breaks, but by doing so, we will cut out of meetings early or show up to our next meetings late, which creates additional stress. We want to take care of ourselves, but we don’t want to do so at the expense of others. Most people try to be considerate. In that attempt, we unknowingly increase our stress load.

Who is to blame?

We are all working within a pre-defined structure. In my high school, the administrators decided on the class period schedule and the amount of transition time. In our workplace, we all just accept and work with the Microsoft Outlook defaults. Therefore, I can easily blame Microsoft, but I must also credit Microsoft for giving us all an easy way to solve this problem. There is a feature that has been available for some time that solves this problem.

For those of you sitting in front of your work computer right now, follow along with me: Click File, Options, Calendar, Calendar Options. There’s a beautiful little check box entitled “End appointments and meetings early.” Check it.

There are two sub-options. By default, Outlook will automatically end meetings less than one hour, 5 minutes early, and it will automatically end meeting that are more than one hour, 10 minutes early.

This immediately has the following effect for all meetings that you schedule: 30-minute meetings start on time, but end after 25 minutes. 60-minute meetings end after 50 minutes. 90-minute meetings end after 80 minutes. This is an elegant solution that automatically gives your meeting participants transition time before their next meeting.

While this is a powerful first step there are three problems that need to be overcome:

Discipline. When the bell rang at my high school, it rang with authority. Everyone obeyed it. If you didn’t, that could likely mean detention. It’ll be tempting to run your 25-minute meeting to the 29, or 30-minute mark, because you are discussing “important things.” Think of all the times your teacher was in mid-sentence when the bell rang in your high school. It didn’t matter. The class was over. We need to be equally disciplined in ending our meetings on time.

Underestimating. You might realize that you really need a full 30 minutes or full 60 minutes to have a successful meeting. Then you need to book a larger timeslot. If the 30-minute meeting cannot fit in 25 minutes, then book a 50-minute slot. It’s that simple.

Community. At my high school, everyone operated on the same schedule. It would have been chaotic if different classes offered different amounts of transition time between classes. Therefore, it is helpful if everyone in a department operates on the same rules. We did this within CHS IT recently. Several had already been making this a practice, but we recently made this the norm department-wide.

If you’ve been reading Zach on Leadership for a while now, you know that I care deeply about effectively managing fatigue. We simply cannot do our best work if we are exhausted and stressed all of the time. We should switch up our work location, figure out our ergonomics, give ourselves camera breaks, and use our PTO. And now, we should schedule 25-minute meetings. All of these tactics work together to make a better work environment where we can truly do our best work. Our teams are counting on us to be our best. Don’t just trudge through your day but set yourself up for success. You can do it!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download