Farhan Thawar: recommendation

Transcript context

…I love that. Okay. One thing you mentioned is meeting thing. For people that don't know what you all did with meetings, I think it might be worth just sharing that briefly, because it's awesome and something a lot of companies can learn from. Yeah, sure. Actually, the funny story about the meeting Armageddon, is that, I was messaging Toby prior to me starting at Shopify about meeting Armageddon. And so, I actually think I had a little hand in him doing this before I got to Shopify. I was like, "Hey, have you seen..." I think it was Dropbox, "Have you seen a Dropbox is doing and Meetingageddon? And so, he was like, "This is super interesting." This is years before I started. So, I think it's funny that it ended up being a real thing. But here's what we do. Once a year at a random time, we will delete all recurring meetings that have more than two people, so not one-on- ones, and are internal people only, so not interviews or external partner meetings. And then, we have a two-week moratorium where you're not allowed to add a reoccurring meeting. You can have a regular meeting, but not a reoccurring meeting. And the idea is that there's a lot of inertia behind a recurring meeting. It just always is there, and you know it's coming up, and it's hard to delete, because you're like, "Oh yeah, we talk about this thing every week." And so, what we do is we just do a meeting reset. And, I think, yeah, it's just called chaos monkey and the admins go in and just delete everything. Now what's cool about it is, it forces you to rethink, "Do we need a recurring meeting? Or do we just need one meeting? Or do we need a different cadence?" That's one thing. The other thing is it frees up so much crafter time, right? One of the stats I track across engineering is how many hours are individual contributors in meetings per week? And we noticed that after we did... We did two things by the way. And I have a spicy second one for this, but the first one was we deleted meetings. And the second thing we did was we moved a lot of our Slack into Facebook workplace, which I'll talk about. Those are the only two things we did. And we saw a huge decrease in the amount of time crafters were in meetings. And then, we saw all kinds of other productivity enhancements, because they were able to have that flow time and work on things. So, we're at something like three hours of meetings per week for an individual contributor at Shopify, which is phenomenal. Three hours a week is amazing. I think managers is not that bad. I think I tweeted this. I think it's six or seven hours per week. That's not bad at all, in order to get aligned. And then, all the rest of the time is work time. And how many hours was it before Meetingageddon and Workplace?…

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