Remote and Asynchronous Collaboration That Actually Works

In the first week of January 2023, Shopify employees came back from the holidays to emptier calendars. It was a blunt experiment in remote and asynchronous collaboration: over the break, the Ottawa-founded company had run a script that deleted every recurring meeting with three or more people. According to CNN’s report on the internal memo, nearly 10,000 events disappeared. Wednesdays became meeting-free, meetings of 50 or more people were confined to a six-hour window on Thursdays, and staff were told to wait two weeks before putting anything back. Chief operating officer Kaz Nejatian called it a “useful subtraction.” A month…