How Basecamp runs without standing meetings.

The sentence on 37signals’s own “how we work” page is the kind of claim that would make most HR teams nervous: “No all-hands meetings. No standups. No recurring meetings of any kind.”

Basecamp — trading as 37signals — has run this policy for over a decade. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson have written three books explaining the mechanics: Rework (2010), Remote (2013), and It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work (2018). The methodology that replaces meetings is Shape Up, published free online by Ryan Singer in 2019.

This piece walks through what actually holds the absence of meetings together — and where I think the model stops being portable.

The claim and the book

From It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, chapter titled “The quickest way to disaster is a meeting”:

“We treat meetings like we treat fire — avoid them whenever possible and contain them when unavoidable.”

Elsewhere in the same chapter: “Meetings should be a last resort, especially big ones.” The writing is concise to the point of being quotable — which is itself a signal of a team that writes rather than meets.

What replaces the meetings

The core substitution mechanism is written, asynchronous updates — called “heartbeats” in Shape Up. From chapter 12:

“We don’t have recurring status meetings. Teams communicate progress by writing heartbeats.”

Heartbeats are short written updates from a team to the rest of the company, sent at the end of a project. They replace what most organisations would handle with a weekly standup multiplied by a quarterly review meeting.

The broader working pattern is six-week cycles followed by two-week cool-downs. Inside a cycle, a small team — usually a designer and one or two programmers — has autonomy to ship a single project. There are no sprints, no standing reviews, no sprint retrospectives. If the project can’t be done in six weeks, it gets cut back until it can, or dropped.

How decisions happen without meetings

Shape Up answers this explicitly. Decisions about what to work on happen at betting tables— short, focused sessions at cycle boundaries where leadership reviews written pitches and commits to a slate of work for the next six weeks. Betting tables are meetings, but they’re not recurring status meetings — they’re decision meetings, timeboxed to the cadence of the work.

Inside a cycle, decisions happen in the document trail. A programmer proposes a direction, the designer comments, the product lead chimes in. The written back-and-forth is the meeting. If someone genuinely needs synchronous time, they grab it ad-hoc — but the default is asynchronous.

What this model requires to work

Basecamp’s model is often held up as a template. I’d be cautious about that framing. The preconditions that make it work at 37signals are not generic:

1. A writing culture, already in place. 37signals has always been a writing-first company. Their own product is a writing-based collaboration tool.
2. Small, stable teams. Roughly 75 people, very low attrition, many long-tenured staff who have internalised the norms.
3. Founder-CEOs. Fried and DHH can enforce this policy because they own the company. Policies of this shape are much harder to hold without that authority.
4. An async-first product, built by the company. They eat their own dog food, which means the tool itself reinforces the working pattern.

Take any one of those away and the model starts leaking. Organisations that try to copy Basecamp’s calendar without replicating their writing culture usually end up with neither meetings nor documentation, and coordination quietly falls apart.

What’s portable

The whole model isn’t portable to most organisations. But pieces are — and the pieces that are most portable are also the ones that produce most of the gain:

• Replacing status meetings with written heartbeats.
• Running recurring decision-making as timeboxed betting tables, not standing committees.
• Giving small teams autonomy over a timeboxed project, with a cool-down at the end.
• Treating ad-hoc working sessions as cheap and scheduled meetings as expensive.

Basecamp is the most public example of a company that has thought carefully about meetings and concluded that most of them aren’t necessary. Whether you take their full conclusion or half of it, the writing culture is the part that does the work. Everything else is structure around it.