No Meeting Wednesday?

[financeguy]

I may be a bit late to the party on this after seeing it is a common term but I just found out when a job listing was sent to me to post in class that included as benefits "No Meeting Wednesday." Has anyone tried this or something similar to cut down on excessive meetings within an academic environment?

[Like2Ski]

That sounds wonderful. I'm a department chair at a medium sized university. The faculty in my department want to meet more often and hold longer meetings...it's nuts.

[mamselle]

This may not still be a thing, but at several schools I once knew of, profs who only taught twice a week, on T-Th,  treated F-M as their research and writing time (translate, hyper-long weekend) and worked from home.

They would only come in on Wednesdays, and so that was the only possible time for meetings: we knew better than to try any other time.

To be fair, some lived a ways out, kept an apartment in town for their 'teaching days,' and weren't to hand otherwise. So there was that.

But 'No-meeting Wednesdays" would not have worked for them at all...or more precisely,  for those wanting to meet with them.

M.

[financeguy]

I suppose the concept doesn't necessarily need to be implemented on a specific day to have a similar result. I would prefer having a set policy of a specific maximum meeting time or at a minimum no meetings of indefinite time, allowing those who drag things out unlimited reign. Whatever leads to reduction is fine with me.

[mamselle]

True. "Meetings on Wednesdays Only" might do that: everyone would have to trim their sails so they didn't blow the more limited time away...

M.

[jerseyjay]

A friend of mine who works from home for what used to be called an office job has "no-Zoom Fridays" and she likes it. When i was working in an office, we used to joke that we couldn't get any meetings done because there were so many meetings to talk about the work we weren't doing because we were in meetings.

At my current school, Mondays are the days that there are most meetings--Senate meetings, department meetings, department chair meetings with the deans, deans meeting with the provost, etc. They are rotated (so one week is the Senate, the next the union meeting, etc) and stacked (so there might be a provost meeting with the deans at 10am, then the deans meeting with the chairs at noon, and then departmental meetings at 2pm). It still can make for a long day--especially if you actually have a class to teach sometime on Monday. It does however mean that on other days people are usually free of meeting (excepting administrators or people on committees). Having a meeting on a Friday would usually be considered gauche, although high up administrators have called meetings on Friday morning or Friday afternoon--presumably because that is the only time everybody is free.

As for faculty wanting more meetings--I have never heard of such a thing. Nobody I know actually likes faculty meetings.

[Ruralguy]

People will of course never generally say they want more meetings.
However, when it is their turn to either chair something or just lead a project, they are likely at some point to say "we need to stay just a little bit late today.." (and then do that 5 times) or say "I'm sorry to do this, but can we just add one extra meeting so we can get this done?"

I don't even think that its particularly evil to do this.  Its the useless Committee on Committees to discuss why there are so many damn Committees that I hate.