Could every single person’s job experience could be improved by an extra week to catch up on work — without new deadlines, deliverables and transactions?
Taskrabbit HQ is piloting a workflow adjustment to find out. The company, which connects individuals with “Taskers,” or gig workers that help complete projects, has been implementing Deep Think Weeks since September 2023.
“We kept hearing feedback that calendars were filling up with meetings, leaving little time for heads-down work,” Kelli Mills, Taskrabbit’s manager of people experience, told HR Dive via email. In response, Taskrabbit created Deep Think Weeks. For those workdays, company-wide and departmental meetings were canceled.
“With no elaborate frameworks or mandatory deliverables, we simply granted our team the autonomy to focus on the work they deemed most important,” Mills explained.
Initially, Deep Think Weeks happened twice a year, but the response was “overwhelmingly positive,” which led Taskrabbit to increase the frequency to once a quarter.
Taskrabbit employees use this time in a variety of ways. Some people clean out their inbox, some workers participate in learning and development courses, and some employees launch new passion projects. “Because autonomy and trust are core to our culture, we don’t dictate how employees spend this time,” Mills said.
When asked how Deep Think Weeks have improved the quality of her work experience specifically, Mills told HR Dive, “Honestly, I’d struggle to find a project or product launch at Taskrabbit that Deep Think Week hasn’t touched in some way.” She went on to explain how the people team used a recent Deep Think Week to overhaul employee initiatives, such as Taskrabbit’s recognition and bonus programs. This work is “nearly impossible to pull off in 30-minute pockets between other meetings,” Mills said.
Likewise, a cross-functional team mapped out the company’s AI hackathon. “Two very different types of work, same underlying ingredient: An uninterrupted chunk of time to go deep,” Mills said.
How to bring Deep Think Week to the workplace
For HR professionals broaching this idea with their employer, Mills’ advice is: Don’t pitch Deep Think Week as a perk but as an operational fix.
Mills shared her belief that many business leaders already know that meetings are taking a toll on workers, “but they haven’t quantified the loss,” she said. “Deep Think Week offers a low-cost, low-risk way to test that theory without adding budget, headcount or permanent policy changes. You’re rearranging the calendar and creating a new fun ritual.”
Another key factor in securing approval for an initiative like Deep Think Week is to bring “receipts,” Mills said. This doesn’t have to be a formal research report either. “We had an engagement survey where employees were, unprompted, asking for more time and space to deliver,” Mills said, explaining that these are the data points they brought to upper management.
“When employees explicitly ask for uninterrupted time to innovate and execute, leadership support comes easily,” she said.
What happens next?
Even once approved, HR will have to manage the logistics of a Deep Think Week. For example, Taskrabbit employees in customer-facing roles are exempt from this initiative, “so customers never experience a disruption,” Mills said, emphasizing that it’s crucial to plan these exceptions intentionally.
Additionally, while company-wide and standing departmental meetings are broadly canceled, Taskrabbit leaves the small-picture details to each team’s discretion. For example, Mills said, some may want to keep their 1:1s with their managers, while other employees want to get even more time back. “Specificity is what actually protects the time,” she said. “Vague guidance gets ignored.”
Lastly, Mills acknowledged that while this meeting-free week may be a short-term operational fix, it’s not a cure-all for the workplace’s overarching problems.
“Deep Think Week surfaced something bigger for us: Our overall meeting culture needed a second look,” she said, adding that this led Taskrabbit’s people team to do a broader meeting culture audit.
“Every meeting now requires a clear owner, purpose, and agenda, and undergoes quarterly reviews. The two efforts together have made a real impact in our meeting culture,” she said. The meeting audit is crucial because “otherwise you’re just giving people a nice long exhale before the same thing squeezes back in,” Mills said.