Is There A Best Time To Meet During The Workday?

The pandemic has impacted the workplace in many ways, but there is one challenge in particular that almost every remote worker can relate to: the struggle to maintain work-life balance. While we previously had work meetings scheduled from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. throughout the work week, working-from-home has led to some of those barriers — which differentiate between when you’re “on” and “off” the clock — becoming blurred. Additionally, it’s important to remember how much has changed since before the pandemic. Back in 2019, the UK-based scheduling firm YouCanBookMe found the optimal time for a meeting to be Tuesday at 2:30 p.m., based on over 2 million responses to 530,000 meeting invitations. But the pandemic has led us to readjust our schedules. Working from home, workers now have shift meetings to accommodate other personal responsibilities, such as teaching children or helping family members.  As such, there are many more factors to consider as we move forward and schedule meetings in this new normal. There may have been a “best time to meet” during the day before the pandemic, but it’s a little more complicated now. So if you’re thinking about what time to schedule your next meeting, here are some things to consider.  You first have to evaluate the new work schedule. Previously, the work day typically lasted approximately 8 or 9 hours, with most companies operating from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. However, as more companies and workers have reevaluated the 40 – 45 hour work week, that has also changed the regular “office hours.”  According to a June 2021 piece by Joe Pinsker for The Atlantic, the concept of a 40-hour work week only worked when we believed we had 40 hours of work per week. Businesses are questioning their physical office spaces and the needs of in-office work, and those questions are still in the ether — but they ultimately also lead to the question of: what if we limited the work week to just 4 days, instead of 5? The concept has been tested sporadically around the globe, with the most recent experiment in Iceland by Autonomy showcasing no change to productivity, but (actually) a substantial increase in happiness. Some offices have even evaluated a 5 to 6-hour work day, going from the more consistent 40-hour work week to a 25 or 30-hour work week. As such, check in with your office — will your team continue to work Monday through Friday, or will the team be limiting work to just four days per week?