12,000 meetings deleted overnight

Hi Everyone,

Shopify started 2023 by deleting 12,000 recurring meetings from its calendar overnight. The company estimated the change would save 322,000 hours of meeting time that year.

Starbucks went the other way. Its menu kept growing year by year, one product at a time, until customers found ordering overwhelming and baristas couldn't keep up. The board replaced the CEO in September 2024.

Same lesson, different direction. Every team has dozens of small defaults - things everyone does, simply out of routine - like meeting length, approval thresholds, who's on the hiring panel, and what the standard agenda looks like. Some were chosen on purpose. Most weren't.

Today we're walking you through how to find them, and change one this week.

Designed vs. inherited

Shopify's defaults were designed. CEO Tobi Lütke and COO Kaz Nejatian made a call: most recurring meetings of three or more people weren't earning their cost. They wiped them out and built a Meeting Cost Calculator into the calendar so anyone booking a new meeting could see the price. A one-hour meeting with seven people, including two execs, comes to about $2,115.

As Nejatian put it: "No one at Shopify would expense a $500 dinner. But lots and lots of people spend way more than that in meetings without ever making a decision."

Starbucks' defaults were inherited. Nobody chose menu sprawl, or a system that left customers waiting and baristas too rushed to learn their names. Each new product launch made sense on its own. But considering their impact when they all added up was never anyone's job.

When Brian Niccol came in, he cut 13 drinks in his first six months and killed the Oleato line. He brought back ceramic mugs and free refills, and set a four-minute target from order to handoff. He told Semafor's CEO Signal podcast: "We got really focused on trying to be efficient and run it like a manufacturing facility, as opposed to recognizing… this is actually a customer service experience."

So how do we become more efficient and not just do things the way they've always been done?

Run a 30-minute audit

Block 30 minutes for today or tomorrow. Write down the five defaults your team uses most. You don't need a full list, only enough to make them visible.

A few places to look:

• Meeting length: Outlook hands you 60-minute slots by default. Google hands you 30. Neither is a number you chose.
• Approval threshold: What can a manager approve without escalating to you? If you have to think about it, it isn't written down anywhere.
• Hiring panel: Look at who interviews senior hires. The same four or five people probably show up for every candidate. When was the last time you changed who's on the list?
• Standard agenda: Pull up your weekly leadership meeting agenda. If nobody adds anything, are you mostly looking at status updates or actual decisions? If it's mostly status, an email could do the same job.
• Default CC list: Look at the last big email thread you sent. Five names on it have been getting copied for years. Some of them probably aren't reading. Cut them.

Pick one. Change it for two weeks.

Once you have your five, label each one "designed" or "inherited." Designed means you or someone on your team made a deliberate call. Inherited means nobody did.

Pick one inherited default and change it for two weeks. Set the default meeting to 25 minutes.

Swap the standard agenda from status updates to decisions. Drop half the CC list.

Then see what breaks. If nothing does, the default was creating inefficiency and possibly poor results.

Go deeper

👉 Amazon: Andy Jassy's 2024 Letter to Shareholders – the source of the one-way / two-way door framing and Amazon's "Bureaucracy Mailbox," which has produced 375+ process changes from about 1,000 employee submissions.

👉 Fortune: Shopify's CFO on the Meeting Cost Calculator – the original explanation of how the calculator works, including the numbers behind the 12,000 deleted meetings.

👉 Semafor: How Brian Niccol jolted Starbucks back to growth – the CEO Signal interview where Niccol explains why he cut the menu and rebuilt the in-store defaults.

👉 McKinsey: If we're all so busy, why isn't anything getting done? – the DARE framework (Deciders, Advisers, Recommenders, Executers) as a cleaner alternative to RACI for assigning decision rights.

Coming up tomorrow

Tomorrow, we're sharing one question that tells you whether your purpose is doing any work.

See you tomorrow!

P.S. Default meeting length where you work – 30, 60, or something else?