Does this need a meeting?

Hey Everyone,

Managers spend roughly 25% of their working hours in meetings. For senior leaders, that number is often 40% or more. And every time someone gets pulled out of focused work, it takes about 23 minutes to get back to the same level of concentration.

When you add those interruptions up across a week, the lost time is significant (especially for the people doing the most cross-functional work).

A lot of those meetings could be written updates, shared docs, or short async threads.

We're walking you through a framework to make async your team's default, as well as when it makes sense to break that default and actually meet up.

Write first, meet only when you have to

Async by default doesn't mean no meetings.

It means your team writes first and meets only when writing isn't enough.

The companies that have made this work (GitLab, Shopify, Zapier…) share a few common habits:

• They put proposals and decisions in a shared place so anyone can review without being in the room
• They set expectations for response times (24 hours is a common standard)
• And they protect blocks of uninterrupted time so people can do deep work

One rule, three exceptions

If the work can be written up and shared for async review, do that. Write the proposal, post the update, share the doc and let people respond on their own time.

You break the rule in three situations:

1. When it's urgent: If the issue needs a response faster than your team's async window – say, faster than 24 hours – a meeting or a call makes sense.

Production incidents, time-sensitive customer problems, and decisions that block other people's work all qualify. If it can wait until tomorrow, it can probably be async.

2. When it's ambiguous: Some topics are too messy or too early-stage to resolve in writing. When you need rapid back-and-forth to clarify what you're even deciding, or when there are more unknowns than knowns, synchronous time is more efficient.

The async prep still helps here – send a short brief before the meeting so people show up ready to discuss, not ready to read.

3. When the stakes are personal: Difficult feedback, sensitive personnel decisions, negotiations where tone matters – these are better handled in real time, where people can read the room and adjust.

Trying to have these conversations in a doc or a thread tends to escalate misunderstandings rather than resolve them.

If none of those three apply, the meeting probably doesn't need to happen.

The numbers back this up

When companies measure what happens after cutting meetings, the results are consistent.

• Shopify eliminated over 450,000 meetings in a single year and saved roughly 322,000 hours after rolling out a meeting reduction policy.
• Zapier saved between 1,000 and 3,000 meeting hours in one no-meetings week.
• TechSmith ran a full month without meetings and reported that employees felt more productive and more in control of their time.

In each case, the teams said communication didn't suffer.

Where this goes wrong

Fewer meetings mean fewer real-time conversations, and some of those conversations matter. Teams still need a way to talk through tension, disagreements, and sensitive topics face to face.

The two things that make async stick are documentation and leadership behavior.

Teams need a shared place where proposals and decisions live so async review actually works.

And leaders need to model the default – if you schedule a call every time something comes up, the rest of the team will too, regardless of what the handbook says.

Go deeper

👉 GitLab: Asynchronous working guide – the most comprehensive public handbook on async norms, with specific guidance on when to write and when to meet

👉 Zapier: We tried no-meetings for a week – a detailed writeup of their experiment, including what they measured and what they'd do differently

👉 TechSmith: Async-first report (PDF) – findings from their month-long no-meetings experiment, with employee survey data

Coming up tomorrow

Tomorrow we'll go through a structured method for evaluating senior hires that cuts executive turnover by nearly 50%.

Have a good one!

P.S. Could this work on your team, or would it fall apart in a week? Let us know your thoughts.