Should you try a no-meeting week?

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One working day every week, or 23% of their time, in a meeting. The weight of the workday often prevents employees from having uninterrupted time to concentrate, causing them to extend their hours well beyond the traditional 9 to 5. It's tempting for companies to embrace the appeal of no meetings, hoping the extra time will lead to more focused work. But does eliminating meetings actually work? Grace Williams, VP of client relations of the PR agency Pan Blast, convinced her leadership team to cancel all meetings for a week. With over 20 meetings filling more than half her schedule, Grace saw a no meetings week as a chance to get meaningful work done while relieving some zoom fatigue. The result? While some employees missed social interactions and struggled with understanding workload, 92% of employees said they'd like to repeat the experiment again later that year. So what's the right move for companies? Should they dedicate a day each week to deep work or test a full week without meetings and in an era of improved collaboration tools and smarter calendar management, is the real opportunity in small refinements rather than sweeping changes. Let's take a look with help from some experts. Heather Curtis brought a no meeting Fridays policy with her when she joined Tormach two years ago, and the rest of the company adopted it soon after. The result? Higher productivity, no communication gaps, and a noticeable shift in morale. People use Fridays to catch up on emails, finish admin tasks, and tie up loose ends, which clears the mental clutter before the weekend. It also creates a natural incentive to finish collaborative work by Thursday, so deadlines tend to be hit earlier. The idea came from her experience at larger companies where Friday meetings were often canceled last minute by leadership, throwing off your day and your mindset. It felt inefficient and frustrating, so she decided to flip that script and just eliminate the expectation of meetings altogether. David Shim, the co founder and CEO of Readai, thinks no meeting policies and no meeting weeks should be a thing of the past thanks to AI. Instead of an all or nothing approach that limits how people want to work, instead give them the tools to step out of meetings that they can miss while still ensuring they get the information they need. It's all infinitely more possible today. When teams implement an AI meeting copilot, individuals naturally attend 20% fewer meetings nearly immediately while still getting access to the content via shared meeting reports and connected enterprise search. No one even has to review meeting minutes any longer. You simply prompt your knowledge base for the information you need and move through your day faster. Edward White, who's the head of growth at Beehive, knows that growth requires speed and meetings are slowing them down. So they implemented a complete no meeting policy for five consecutive business days. No regular stand ups, check ins, or even quick calls. The week was structured like a sprint, with each participant committing to one key project and sharing it in a slack thread. Monday morning output during that week doubled compared to a typical week, as measured by the number of campaigns launched and features delivered. It felt electric. However, by Friday they realized that relationships had suffered slightly. Informal collaboration and creative riffing were almost non existent without real time chats. So to ensure long term success, anchor the week with written public commitments. At Beehive, they require a Monday kickoff post and a Friday recap. Without that, a lack of meetings simply makes people invisible and invisibility kills momentum faster than meetings ever could. That's all today from Fast Company Talk to you tomorrow.

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