An unfortunate consequence of COVID-19 is that I had a lot more meetings online. Because those meetings are planned remotely it became easy to plan them back-to-back as we no longer had to take into account that people have to physically move from one meeting room to another.
This made it really difficult to regain time to think, to recharge the batteries and keep focussed. In the end it became a real energy drain and had a negative impact on my productivity.
To help myself (and my team) to create some time between our meetings, I changed the default meeting length in Outlook.
- Open Outlook. Go to File –> Options.
- In the Options window, go to Calendar.
- In the Calendar Options section, put a check in the Shorten appointments and meetings checkbox.
- If you want you can change the time a meeting should be shortened.