There has been a concern lately on my team about the number of regularly scheduled meetings eating into their productivity. There is a consensus that just about all of the meetings are necessary so having less meetings isn't really an option. However, one way to improve the situation would be to batch all meetings within 1-2 days per week rather than have them spread throughout the entire week. The struggle is that there a large number of meetings, each with different combinations of 2-4 people, so it's difficult to batch meetings for everyone.

I recall hearing about a tool that would let people plan meetings in advance and the tool would schedule them in batches so the team could maximize their uninterrupted focus time. I would also be open to some type of methodology instead of a tool to accomplish our goal.

What do you do to plan meetings more efficiently?