On January 3, 2023, thousands of Shopify employees returned from the holidays, opened their calendars, and found them empty. Not partially cleared. Empty.
Over the break, Shopify’s IT team had run a script that deleted every recurring meeting with three or more attendees across the entire company. 12,000 calendar events, gone overnight. By the company’s own estimate, that freed up 76,500 hours of previously occupied time.
This wasn’t a glitch. It was a deliberate calendar purge — and it became one of the most talked-about workplace experiments of the decade. Here’s exactly what Shopify did, what happened next, and how you can run your own version.
What Happened on January 3, 2023
Shopify’s COO Kaz Nejatian announced the purge in a company-wide memo. His framing was blunt: “Meetings are a bug.” CEO Tobi Lütke echoed it publicly, calling meetings “usually a bug” that papers over a lack of trust, clarity, or proper process.
The mechanics were straightforward. IT wrote a script targeting every recurring calendar event with three or more participants. No exceptions for seniority. No grace period. The script ran, and 12,000 events disappeared.
Bloomberg and Fortune broke the story the same day. Deann Evans, Shopify’s Director of EMEA partnerships, described the experience as “intense and uncomfortable” — but ultimately “liberating.” People suddenly had space to think.
The discomfort was the point. Shopify wasn’t trying to optimize their meeting culture. They were trying to reset it.
Shopify’s New Meeting Rules
Deleting everything was only step one. Shopify simultaneously rolled out a new framework to prevent the same bloat from creeping back:
- Recurring meetings with 3+ people: Cancelled. If you wanted one back, you had to recreate it from scratch with a clear justification for why it needed to exist.
- No-meeting Wednesdays: An entire day reserved for deep work, company-wide. No exceptions.
- Large meetings (50+ people): Restricted to Thursdays only, between 11am and 5pm ET. Maximum one per week.
The key shift was philosophical. Meetings went from opt-out to opt-in. Previously, you had to actively decline or cancel to get time back. Now you had to actively justify creating a meeting in the first place.
The Results
Shopify didn’t just announce a policy and move on — they measured what happened. Per WorkLife’s reporting, the results by mid-2023 were significant:
- 33% reduction in meeting time compared to the same period the previous year
- 25% projected increase in completed projects — people were shipping more when they had time to actually work
- Most deleted meetings were never recreated. This is the stat that tells you how much calendar bloat companies silently carry. The majority of those 12,000 meetings simply weren’t needed.
Shopify also built an internal meeting cost calculator that displayed the dollar cost of every meeting based on attendee salaries. Per Fast Company, it showed costs ranging from $700 to $1,600 for a typical 30-minute meeting — numbers that made people think twice before hitting “Schedule.”
What This Actually Cost (Our Calculation)
Let’s put real numbers on the Shopify meeting purge. These are our estimates based on publicly available data.
Shopify had roughly 10,000 employees in early 2023. The average tech company salary (fully loaded with benefits and overhead) lands around $150,000/year, which works out to approximately $72/hour.
Immediate impact: 76,500 hours freed × $72/hour = ~$5.5 million in reclaimed time from the initial purge alone.
Ongoing impact: Before the purge, Shopify employees averaged roughly 11 hours/week in meetings (consistent with industry data). A 33% reduction means 3.6 hours saved per person per week. Annualized across the company:
10,000 employees × 3.6 hours/week × 52 weeks × $72/hour = ~$135 million/year in reclaimed productive time.
A caveat: these are reclaimed hours, not direct cash savings. Nobody got a check for $135 million. But Shopify’s 25% increase in project completion suggests those hours translated into real output. Freed time doesn’t automatically become productive time — but with the right culture, it often does.
Curious what your own numbers look like? You can run this calculation for your own team in about 10 seconds.
How to Run Your Own Meeting Purge
You don’t need 10,000 employees or a COO willing to tweet “meetings are a bug” to reclaim your team’s time. Here’s a practical framework that scales from a 5-person startup to a 500-person company.
Step 1 — Measure Your Meeting Load
You can’t improve what you haven’t measured. Before cancelling anything, get a baseline.
Use MeetBurn’s calendar integration for a detailed breakdown, or the free calculator for a quick estimate. Either way, capture these numbers:
- Total hours per week in meetings
- Percentage of your work week spent in meetings
- Number of recurring meetings
- Estimated annual meeting cost
Write them down. You’ll compare against these in 30 days.
Step 2 — Classify Every Recurring Meeting
Pull up your list of recurring meetings and sort each one into four categories:
- Essential: Directly drives decisions or unblocks work. Has a clear owner and agenda. Can’t be replaced with async communication. (Example: weekly sprint planning with defined outputs.)
- Reducible: Useful but happens too often or runs too long. (Example: a daily standup that could be twice a week, or a 60-minute sync that could be 25 minutes.)
- Replaceable: The information exchanged could travel via Slack, Loom, or a shared doc. (Example: status update meetings where people read slides to each other.)
- Zombie: Nobody remembers why this exists. The original purpose is gone, but nobody cancelled it. (Example: a “weekly sync” from a project that shipped six months ago.)
Step 3 — Choose Your Approach
Three options, depending on your appetite for disruption:
- Nuclear (the Shopify way): Cancel everything with 3+ recurring attendees. Force people to recreate only what they actually need. This requires executive buy-in and a thick skin for the first two weeks of complaints.
- Surgical: Cancel all Zombies and Replaceables immediately. Cut Reducibles in half (frequency or duration). Leave Essentials alone. This is the most practical approach for most teams.
- Gradual: Start with a no-meeting day. Run a meeting audit monthly. Remove one or two Zombies each cycle. Lower friction, but slower results.
Step 4 — Set Guardrails
Purging meetings without new norms just leads to the same bloat six months later. Set these guardrails before you cut:
- One no-meeting day per week (protect it religiously)
- Default meeting length: 25 minutes, not 30 or 60
- Mandatory agendas — no agenda, no meeting
- Quarterly recurring meeting review — every recurring meeting must be re-justified or it gets auto-cancelled
Step 5 — Measure After 30 Days
Pull the same numbers from Step 1. Compare. Share the results with your team — nothing reinforces new habits like seeing “we reclaimed 47 hours this month” in a Slack channel.
Meeting Purge Checklist
Print this. Pin it. Run through it quarterly.
- ☐ Calculate current meeting cost (meetburn.app)
- ☐ List all recurring meetings
- ☐ Classify: Essential / Reducible / Replaceable / Zombie
- ☐ Cancel Zombies immediately
- ☐ Replace Replaceables with async (Slack, Loom, docs)
- ☐ Cut Reducibles in half (frequency or duration)
- ☐ Set one no-meeting day per week
- ☐ Require agendas for all meetings
- ☐ Default to 25-minute meetings
- ☐ Review again in 30 days
Frequently Asked Questions
How many meetings did Shopify cancel?
Shopify cancelled approximately 12,000 recurring calendar events in January 2023. The purge targeted every recurring meeting with three or more attendees, freeing an estimated 76,500 hours of employee time.
Did Shopify’s meeting purge work?
Yes. Shopify reported a 33% reduction in meeting time and a 25% projected increase in completed projects in the months following the purge. Most cancelled meetings were never recreated, suggesting significant calendar bloat.
What is a calendar purge?
A calendar purge is the deliberate, bulk cancellation of meetings — typically recurring ones — to reset a team or company’s meeting culture. The goal is to eliminate unnecessary meetings and force intentional recreation of only the ones that matter.
How do you calculate the cost of a meeting?
Multiply the number of attendees by their hourly rate (annual salary ÷ 2,080 hours) and the meeting duration. A 30-minute meeting with 5 people averaging $100K/year costs about $40. Tools like MeetBurn automate this from your actual calendar data.
Can a small company do a meeting purge?
Absolutely. Small teams often benefit even more because each person’s time is proportionally more valuable. A 10-person startup spending 30% of its week in meetings is burning roughly $200K/year. You don’t need a script — just a shared spreadsheet and 30 minutes of honest classification. See our guide to meeting management tools for options that help.
Last updated: April 2026. Written by Luis Amaral, Founder of MeetBurn.