I’ve always struggled with my desire to work and my desire to spend time with my team. At one point I found myself feeling stressed running from one meeting to the next to the next with no time in between.
I’m one of those people who HATES looking at his watch in a meeting, I like to show the person I’m engaged. For some reason, checking time in a meeting has always felt a bit rude to me, so I disliked that feeling. By removing back to back meetings, I can allow them to “spill over a little bit” and stay engaged if I need to.
I’m bad with note taking in meetings, always have been, working on it every day, still I’m a 3/10 on my best day. Giving myself 15–30–60 minutes in between meetings enables me to do a little prep for my next one, and wrap up my thoughts from the current one. Back to back meetings make me a bit anxious because I know I’m more likely to be forgetting something, and when I get to take notes, the 2–3 back to back meetings start to blend together, making me less accountable to the meeting I was in.
It gives me time to decompress, I disliked running into a meeting almost out of breath b/c I was trying to stay in one and make it to the other. It just felt a bit crazy to run from, one to the next.
Admittedly I’m fortunate in that I spend probably 50% of my time out of meetings, whereas other roles might spend more of their time in meetings and might not have a choice. On occasion it still happens, but I find having this as a rule of thumb to be quite helpful.
