Looks pretty cool, I'll check it out

One client I worked for had a "heads down Thursday", where no one was allowed to schedule anyone in the app dev department for meetings; general consensus was that Thursday's were by far the most productive day of the week

Meetings' Thursday might be even more productive. (Ie nobody is allowed to schedule anything on any of the other days.)

It's a trade-off. Stakeholders want to be able to discuss upcoming work and course corrections, but developers need uninterrupted time to get current work done.

When I worked as a team lead I created a rule that there could be no meetings in the afternoons. The daily schedule was that we'd have a morning scrum where everyone would say what they did yesterday and plan on doing today. That was also an opportunity to schedule any meetings for the day, to be done immediately following the scrum. As team lead I considered it my job to take on that burden, when possible, and fill in the rest of the team with the pertinent details afterwards.

It worked out fairly well: stakeholders could schedule time any day to talk to the dev team, but every afternoon (at least) was no-outside-interruptions development time.

Did you survey your team to see when their most/least productive times of the day are ?

I usually get the most done in the morning. I would not be as productive if I had nothing but meetings until lunch.

(It doesn't sound like "nothing but meetings until lunch" characterizes your team, I'm just making a point)

In this case it was a distributed team with most the members in Romania (GMT+2) and Armenia (GMT+4) with myself in Ottawa, Canada (GMT-4/5). So our normal working day only overlapped for an hour or two in the morning. So, we didn't have a choice that way when to hold meetings.

At some points in the project my day often ended up being half meetings, half development. Lunch ended up being a break where I'd switch modes from 'team lead' to 'developer'. It wasn't ideal for me, but it was ideal for the rest of the team and I considered that my top priority.

Until it is discovered too late that you are working on the wrong thing.

A client I worked for had his CISO pass away unexpectedly at a relatively young age due to a heart attack. My client then recounted how he received a LinkedIn update a few days following his death, and the first thing my client thought was "talk about remote access!"...he has an interesting sense of humor.

Heh, I bet the latency sucks, though!