You know the feeling: You open your calendar in the morning to find a completely booked day, back-to-back meetings and not even 15 minutes of time to complete any of the items on your to-do list. In fact, your day tomorrow and the day after look just as booked. An HBR study conducted last year found that face-to-face requests are 34 times more successful than email when trying to effectively communicate or persuade someone. And, we all know that spending time with colleagues is critical to cultivating relationships and building company culture. But what if engineering team leaders took away just one day of these interactions to create more headspace for their teams? For the last seven years, I’ve opened space in my engineers’ schedules by mandating that one day per week must have zero meetings. While putting this rule into place successfully has been challenging, the benefits I’ve discovered.