Every four-day week pilot promises fewer meetings. Most organisations already promised that last year, and the diary filled up again anyway.
The problem is rarely intent. It is that meetings are how anxious organisations seek reassurance, allocate blame in advance, and avoid writing things down. Shortening them without changing those habits produces forty short, bad meetings instead of twenty long ones.
At Day5Group, we help organisations transition to a four-day week. Meeting change is usually the first place time is found, and the first place old habits return. Here is the approach we use with clients because it survives contact with real diaries.
Start by counting, not cutting
For two weeks, have each team total its meeting hours per person and mark each meeting with one label: decision, coordination, or information. Information meetings are the first target; most can become a short written update. Coordination meetings often halve when a shared board or queue exists. Decision meetings deserve protection, but they need better inputs.
This count gives you a baseline and a shared language. Without it, “we have too many meetings” stays a feeling that the loudest calendar wins.
Defaults do the heavy lifting
Willpower fails; defaults endure. Set the scheduling tool’s default to 25 or 30 minutes, not an hour. Require an agenda line in every invite: the decision needed or the problem to solve. No agenda, no meeting — and make it acceptable, in practice, for invitees to decline politely.
Microsoft Japan’s August 2019 trial, often quoted for its sales headline, also capped meetings at 30 minutes and limited attendees. Treat its famous output figure with care, as we will explain in a later article, but its meeting discipline is plainly transferable: shorter, smaller, with a purpose stated in advance.
Add two more defaults that pay quickly. Start five minutes after the hour so back-to-back calls end, and finish with the decision, owner and date spoken aloud and written down before anyone leaves.
The decision log replaces the follow-up meeting
Half of all follow-up meetings exist because nobody recorded what was decided. Keep a simple log per team: date, decision, owner, deadline, and what would trigger revisiting it. Share it where the team already works.
Within a month, the log does three jobs. It kills status-chasing meetings, it lets someone on their day off see what moved without messaging colleagues, and it exposes meetings that produce no entries — strong candidates for deletion.
Protect focus time, honestly
Meeting diets fail when the saved hour becomes four new half-hours. Pair shorter meetings with meeting-free blocks each week, agreed at team level. Two two-hour blocks is a realistic start. During those blocks, chat response expectations drop too; focus time that still demands instant replies is not focus time.
Leaders go first. If a senior manager books over the block “just this once”, every week, the block is decorative. Audit your own calendar before auditing anyone else’s.
What not to do
Do not ban meetings altogether. Coverage and safety work needs huddles; creative work needs argument. Do not measure success by meeting count alone, or teams will rename meetings “workshops” and carry on. Measure the total hours, the decisions made, and whether work is moving without evening catch-up.
And do not let asynchronous tools become a second shift. A written update culture only funds a day off if people can write it in the working day and read it in the working day.
Practical steps for the next fortnight
- Count two weeks of meeting hours by label.
- Change the calendar default to 25/30 minutes today.
- Cancel or convert every information-only meeting for one cycle and see what breaks. Usually, nothing does.
- Start the decision log in your next team meeting.
- Book the team’s focus blocks, and have leaders publish theirs.
Meetings will not release a full day by themselves. They are the first, most visible proof that your organisation can delete low-value work, which is the skill the whole pilot depends on.
Sources
- Perpetual Guardian trial, New Zealand (2018), academic monitoring by Auckland universities — reported in ScienceAlert, 2018.
- Microsoft Japan Work-Life Choice Challenge, August 2019 — reported by NPR, 4 November 2019.
- Iceland public-sector shorter-hours trials 2015-2019 — Autonomy and Alda, reported July 2021.
Day5Group is a consultancy that assists in the transition to a 4 day work week. More about Day5Group · All blog articles