A leader's primary function is ensuring that their teams operate at their best, and in today's age of optimization, this goes beyond standard management practices.

In this blog post, we will look at meetings, which are critical to an organization's success, and try to improve them using a popular productivity hacking method called biological prime time.

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What is biological prime time?

Biological prime time (BPT) refers to periods during the day when you have the most energy or feel most productive.

Author Sam Carpenter coined the BPT method in his book "Work the System" to refer to periods of high focus influenced by your ultradian rhythms.

So, the BPT method's goal in this context is to identify the peaks in your average day and use them to schedule important meetings.

Not all meetings are the same

Before we delve into the application part of the methodology, you need to understand that not all meetings are the same.

There are meetings that you can attend right after a heavy lunch and still get a passing grade, and on the other hand, you have meetings that need you to be at your cognitive best.

So it is in your best interest to schedule meetings that need your and your team's best selves during primetime.

Implementing BPT for your meetings

With all that out of the way, let's look at the process of using biological prime time for organizing your meetings.

  1. Identify meetings that require high cognition and need you to be at your best. These include meetings like brainstorming, analysis, and compliance related.

  2. Survey your team members' BPT schedules to try and find overlapping BPT schedules. For example, if most of your team's BPT is at 4 PM, then block that time on your team calendar for meetings.

  3. Once you've time blocked, you can allocate them for high cognition demanding meetings and give back unused time blocks to your team.

  4. No process is perfect, so you'll need to regularly review and reflect on your team's performance during the meetings. Be honest in your assessment; if you are still waiting for a noticeable change in output, then reconsider making adjustments.

Remember that you and your team must compromise when picking meeting slots based on BPT. The larger your team, the more likely some of your team members' BPT will misalign with the rest of the team, so be mindful of it.

Schlussfolgerung

Biological prime time is a helpful productivity method that can drastically boost the output of your team meetings. However, every method is only helpful if it benefits your team, and you should refrain from implementing it at the cost of your team's morale.

Thanks for reading. We've got more content related to meetings, like how to be an effective meeting organizer, choosing a meeting cadence, meeting preparation checklists, etc., so do check them out.