How Shopify and Basecamp Reduced Meetings and What Happened

Shopify and Basecamp are two of the best-known examples of companies cutting meetings on purpose. They took very different routes: one a sudden company-wide cleanup, the other a culture built around writing from the start.

Shopify's calendar purge

In January 2023, Shopify told employees it was:

• Cancelling all recurring meetings with three or more people, with a two-week pause before adding any back.
• Making Wednesdays meeting-free.
• Limiting large meetings of 50 or more people to a window on Thursdays.
• Encouraging people to leave large group chats.

The company said the cleanup removed about 12,000 calendar events, which it put at around 322,000 hours of meetings. Later in 2023, Shopify added a tool to Google Calendar invites that estimates each meeting's cost from the number of attendees and their typical pay.

Basecamp's approach

Basecamp (now 37signals) has argued against meetings for years. Its founders, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, called meetings "toxic" in their 2010 book Rework, and wrote It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work in 2018 about calm, low-meeting work. Their methods include:

• Writing first: proposals, updates and decisions are written and discussed in threads.
• Automatic check-ins: regular written questions, such as what you worked on, instead of status meetings.
• Six-week cycles: work is planned in fixed cycles, described in their book Shape Up, with time between cycles to wrap up.

What happened

Both companies say the changes gave people more focused time. Neither has published a controlled study, so the results are their own reports rather than independent measurements. Shopify cut meetings during a period of layoffs and restructuring, which makes the effect harder to separate from everything else going on.

What other teams can borrow

1. Audit recurring meetings: list every repeating meeting, and cancel or shrink the ones nobody would miss. See auditing your team calendar.
2. Protect a meeting-free day or set of hours.
3. Replace status meetings with written updates. See async standups.
4. Show the cost: Meeting Cost Calculator shows a running total during a meeting, based on attendee count and average salary.

Watch out for

Cutting meetings can push work into endless chat threads, or leave new team members isolated. Keep time for one-on-ones and real discussion. See the yearly cost of recurring meetings.