by John J. Walters<\/p>\n
I was surprised to discover recently that a Google search for the best time to schedule a meeting came up with only one helpful post<\/a> suggesting a productive time and the rest of the hits were mostly just how-to posts from the various meeting organizer programs out there with nothing to offer on when people are most alert.\u00c2\u00a0 So I set out to fix that.<\/p>\n What is the best time to schedule a meeting?\u00c2\u00a0 When are people ready to be productive?\u00c2\u00a0 I stumbled across a BBC News article<\/a> about a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153simple formula for staying awake\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (you do want people to stay awake during your meetings, right?) that I thought might give me some indication of the time most people are alert, but it lacked a real explanation of how to apply the formula.\u00c2\u00a0 Apparently the key to staying awake is — you guessed it — getting enough sleep.\u00c2\u00a0 In fact, the British Sleep Society has concluded that, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153If people are tired during the day then they are not getting enough sleep.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 Shocker.<\/p>\n Another study<\/a> suggests that the time that people, on average, are most alert is early evening (between 6 and 7 pm).\u00c2\u00a0 This is because humans used to spend their evening time \u00e2\u20ac\u0153securing the hearth for a safe night’s sleep.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m never one to discredit evolutionary conditioning<\/a>, but it would seem to me that the evening is a less-than-optimal time to schedule a meeting, as most people have already gone home for the day by then.\u00c2\u00a0 The study\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s second choice, dawn, is an even less likely time to find your coworkers at the office — unless you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re a farmer, perhaps.<\/p>\n The American Time Use Survey provides an excellent (and interactive) way<\/a> to look at how most Americans spend each day.\u00c2\u00a0 If the graph is to be believed, the most likely time to find your co-workers at the office is between 9 am and 3 pm, so logically the best time to schedule a work meeting is somewhere between these hours (although when attempting to schedule a non-work meeting you should clearly look at other times, such as the early evening).<\/p>\n If you schedule the meeting well enough in advance and do all the necessary prep-work (preparation<\/a> is<\/a> very<\/a> important<\/a>) then you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re already \u00e2\u20ac\u0153semi-there.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0 People generally have no problem arranging their schedules around a meeting that they know is important and will be relevant to their work.\u00c2\u00a0 But what about when you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have enough time to schedule something a week in advance?<\/p>\n I guess you could always take the WikiAnswers route and shoot for 2 pm on a Wednesday, as this is a nice midpoint in the week after people have returned from lunch and before they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re checking out for the day.\u00c2\u00a0 Or you could let your attendees do some deciding and make use of a helpful program that allows you to propose times and take a vote of when everyone invited will be available — like MeetingCaptain<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by John J. Walters I was surprised to discover recently that a Google search for the best time to schedule a meeting came up with only one helpful post suggesting a productive time and the rest of the hits were mostly just how-to posts from the various meeting organizer programs out there with nothing to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.meetingcaptain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.meetingcaptain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.meetingcaptain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.meetingcaptain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.meetingcaptain.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.meetingcaptain.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.meetingcaptain.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.meetingcaptain.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.meetingcaptain.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}