An easy way to give people a long stretch of uninterrupted time back for work is to make one half of the day “meeting free”. For example, you could decide that from 9am to 1pm there are no meetings. If you have recurring meetings, move them to the other half of the day, so that there are no exceptions. Here are a few tips to make this tick.

1. Make it predictable. Decide which block of four hours is meeting-free and stay consistent with that practice. This’ll help make things predictable for the team and everyone can settle into a routine. 

2. Encourage productive behaviours. Having inviolate time is all nice and dandy, but if people get distracted by chat, email, social media or phone calls, you won’t get much benefit out of this. So people will have to employ their own productivity behaviours; for example, distraction blocking; to make the most of this time.

3. Sync your calendars. You can cut off distractions from within the team, but it’s no fun if you have distractions from outside the team. Set up your calendars so it’s clear to everyone in the organisation that this time is inviolate. That way, no one will block your time for an interview or other company commitments during these hours. You can even set up calendars to auto-decline invites during these hours.