How Shopify cut 322,000 meeting hours in six months.

The memo

On the first working day of 2023, Shopify’s COO Kaz Nejatian sent an internal memo that Fortune broke two days later: every recurring meeting with three or more attendees was being cancelled, effective immediately. About 12,000 events quietly disappeared from the company’s calendars that week (Fortune · Jan 3, 2023).

Alongside the cancellation, Shopify added two rules. No-meeting Wednesdays — zero synchronous meetings for anyone, anywhere in the company. And a narrow window for large meetings: the only time a sync of more than fifty people could be scheduled was Thursdays, 11am to 5pm ET.

Nejatian called it a “chaos monkey.” The reference is to the chaos-engineering pattern Netflix pioneered: randomly break things in production to force the organisation to build resilience. The calendar equivalent is: randomly delete the meetings, and make people re-justify them.

What they reported afterwards

Six months in, Shopify’s CFO Jeff Hoffmeister told Fortune the policy had eliminated roughly 322,000 meeting hours and that the team had built an internal calendar tool — a “meeting cost calculator” — that was on track to cut another ~474,000 events across the year (Fortune · Jul 14, 2023).

Leadership also reported an internal figure — 25% more projects shipped. Take that one with the usual seasoning that comes on self-reported productivity numbers. The point isn’t the exact percentage; it’s the direction.

“No one joined Shopify to have meetings.”

What’s portable for smaller teams

Shopify is 10,000+ people. You, probably, are not. The good news is the mechanism isn’t about scale — it’s about defaults and air cover.

1. Delete the defaults first, re-add by hand. Don’t debate each meeting one-by-one. Remove the recurring set, let the ones that genuinely matter get rebooked in the first week. Most don’t.
2. Explicit reversibility. Say out loud — and in writing — “we will be wrong about some of these; put them back if it matters.” Reversibility is the whole political mechanism. Without it, nothing gets cut.
3. A no-meeting day. Pick one, defend it. The gain is the concentration on the other four — not the meetings avoided on the one.
4. Make the cost visible. Shopify built their own meeting-cost calculator. You can use ours or build your own, but the visibility is load-bearing.

The counterpoint worth taking seriously

Shopify’s numbers are self-reported, and the policy has been criticised since — some teams have said the cut went too far and that work got harder to coordinate async, not easier. That’s the honest version. The right lesson isn’t “cut all meetings.” It’s “put a price on the ones you have, and defend a budget.”

The calculator is the cheapest version of the same forcing function Shopify built internally. If you’d rather not cancel every sync in your org, you can still produce the same behaviour change by putting the live price up on the screen during the meeting.