Best Practices: Lots of Meetings

Find yourself in a lot of meetings all of a sudden? Or maybe, that’s what a majority of your week is like all the time: meeting after meeting. Regardless, you need to find a way to maximize Focus Time outside of meetings. You can avoid burnout by taking short breaks between stretches of back-to-back meetings and make sure the Focus Time you do get is protected. By adjusting your Clockwise setup, you can let us do the heavy lifting to build a great schedule for your busy workday, every day.

Make meetings flexible

Whenever it’s possible, make a meeting flexible. This setting requires all meeting attendees to be within your org. It does not require all attendees to be Clockwise users. If you own the meeting, you can flip this option on at any time. If you don’t own the meeting, consider asking the owner to make it Flexible for everyone in attendance: remember that Clockwise Flexible Meeting moves benefit your entire company.

You can mark a meeting as flexible while you're creating the event or after the event has been created.  Just look for the Flexible Meeting toggle in the event – this will let Clockwise find the best time for this event. You can toggle this setting off at any time. After you've turned it on, select your level of time flexibility.

You can monitor the list of your Flexible Meetings from your dashboard, where you will also see suggestions for making an existing meeting flexible if it’s not already set that way.

Learn how to enable Flexible Meetings here.

Set minimum weekly Focus Time

Clockwise’s aim is to give you adaptable calendar management – a lot of which is to allow maximum ‘deep work’ time. The main line of defense for protecting that time is to enable Focus Time on your calendar. Setting a weekly minimum of Focus Time gives more direction to your flexibility as your calendar attempts to preserve the most back-to-back uninterrupted hours of downtime.

If you’re unsure what feels realistic with a meeting-heavy schedule, don’t worry – simply having the feature enabled with the default all my available Focus Time selected enabled Clockwise to attempt to preserve as much Focus Time as possible. Any time you’re sub-10 hours, you’ll start to see 1-hour blocks preserved in an attempt to meet your goal instead of the typical 2-hour blocks.

You can set your Focus Time goal in Ideal Day.

Protect your time

Change your flexible Focus Times to Holds

You can change any Focus Time event created by Clockwise into a Hold. This allows the Focus Time block to stay where it is. It will not move from where it’s scheduled and your calendar and Slack sync will both show that you’re busy focusing. You can make a hold in-the-moment, within the same day, or later in the week while pre-planning.

You can also choose to protect the Hold even further by choosing to decline new invitations, which is particularly useful for the Focus Time Holds you create in the future: with this option selected, Clockwise will not offer the held time as available times to meet with others.

Learn how to enable individual Focus Time Holds here.

Auto-protect Focus Time

You can set up your week to automatically hold a specific amount of Focus Time regardless of how hectic your week is by turning on the setting that ​​guarantees weekly minimums. Unlike the regular Focus Time setup that notes your preferences, the auto-protect function of Focus Time declines anything that’s in conflict with your minimum goal. This is a great way to make sure you have uninterrupted time to prep for and regroup from many meetings in your schedule.

Learn how to set up auto-decline for protected Focus Time here.

Respect your lunch and meeting breaks

Lunch holds are flexible and consider your preferences for duration and timing within your day. Set up these holds to make sure you’re able to take your daily lunch break.

Enabling meeting breaks allow you to catch a breath when you encounter a long run of back-to-back meetings. This setting adjusts your flexible meetings to create a short break once you hit your timing threshold, and warns other Clockwise users not to schedule within break time to avoid meeting fatigue.

Enable lunch breaks and set up meeting breaks in your day by following those guides.