Meetings & Deep Work
The Danger of Midday Meetings
Let’s say there’s a large production project that has to be done this week, the kind that needs real uninterrupted time to think through and build: shipping a piece of a coding project, working through an accounting audit, writing a set of SOPs from scratch, or sitting down to do a thoughtful hiring review. You’ve set aside today to make a serious dent in it. There’s one meeting on the calendar at 1pm, and somehow the whole day goes differently than planned.
Somehow the morning just got away from you and you didn’t get into a proper headspace to “work” until 10am. You don’t want to start the big work because once you get going, its nearly lunch, so you hold off. You do a bit of email and other 20 minute tasks (of which you have a laundry list to do) in order to fill the time until the meeting. The meeting goes from 1pm to 2pm, and it leaves a few action items you might as well handle while they’re fresh, so there goes another 45 minutes. Now it’s almost 3pm, and you have to leave to pick up the kids around 5pm. The production work, the thing you actually blocked the day for, moves to tomorrow.
If you own the business, maybe the deep work becomes your night or weekend. You as the owner do this because it is “part of the job”, but expecting employees to do this is unreasonable. The meeting was an hour, but it shaped the whole day. That’s the part that’s easy to forget: focused work needs a running start and a clean stretch, so a meeting in the middle takes mental energy on both sides of it, not just its own slot.
This comes down to two different kinds of work. Some roles are at their best moving quickly between things: directing traffic, collecting information to make decisions, taking the next conversation as it comes and are meant to be interruptible, because that’s most of the job. Production work runs the other way. Engineering, accounting, writing, anything where you have to hold the whole problem in your head at once, tends to need a several uninterrupted hours, and those hours don’t add up out of leftover twenty-minute gaps. It is important to GUARD those roles from meetings when needed.
Neither kind of day is wrong. They just need different shapes, and the same calendar usually gets used for both without anyone accounting for the difference. The people doing production work tend to be the ones who feel it most since they are sometimes at the whim of the executive whose job is “meetings” and directing traffic.
It’s also worth thinking about when you build the org itself, not just the calendar. If you organize the company into pods, the client-facing ones are interruptible on purpose, that’s the whole point of a pod. But the functional work, accounting, HR, ops, the plumbing every pod relies on, is production work, and early on that’s often a department of one or two people. A cross-functional role like that gets pulled into everyone’s meetings while still being expected to produce, and there’s no second person to absorb the interruptions. This is part of what SOPs quietly address: when the process is written down, the production person isn’t the only path to the answer, so not every question has to become a meeting on their calendar. As the leader, you’re usually the one in a position to notice this, since the person living it tends to just absorb it.
