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 later he told NPR that the purge had freed up 322,000 hours of meeting time across the company. The headline numbers are dramatic, but the more interesting part is what Shopify was trying to fix. It had gone remote in 2020 and discovered the same thing many companies did: if you move an office online without changing how people communicate, you get the office’s worst habit, the meeting, at an even bigger scale.
Remote and asynchronous collaboration works, but not by default. The companies that make it work treat writing, documentation and meeting discipline as core infrastructure. Here’s what they do differently, and what you can borrow even if your team is only partly remote.
Where remote work stands in Canada
The pandemic spike has faded, but remote work hasn’t gone away. Statistics Canada reported that the share of Canadians working most of their hours from home rose from 7% in May 2016 to 24% in July 2022, then slipped to 21% by July 2023. That’s still triple the pre-pandemic level. Census data tell a similar story: in May 2021, 4.2 million people usually worked at home, more than three times the 2016 count. The same release, based on time-use survey data, found that people working from home saved more than an hour a day on commuting, slept 23 minutes longer, and were more likely to report being satisfied with their work-life balance.
The pressure in the other direction is real, too. The federal government, Canada’s largest employer, now requires public servants to be on site at least four days a week, or 80% of their schedule, as of July 6, 2026.
So most Canadian teams now live somewhere in between: some people in the office, some at home, some in another province or country. That hybrid middle is actually the hardest setup to run well. When half the team is in a room, decisions drift toward whoever was in the room. Async practices are what keep everyone else in the loop.
Remote and asynchronous collaboration starts with writing
Every company that does distributed work well shares one trait: it writes things down, and it treats the written version as the official one.
GitLab is the most extreme example. With more than 2,500 team members and no offices, it runs on a public handbook of over 2,000 pages that covers everything from engineering processes to how to expense a laptop. Its guidance on asynchronous work boils down to a simple loop: do what you can with the information you have, document it, then hand ownership to the next person. The handbook is the single source of truth. If a decision was made in a call but never written down, it effectively wasn’t made.
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, has worked this way since 2005. It describes itself as fully distributed, with about 1,400 employees speaking more than 100 languages. Much of its internal conversation happens on P2, a WordPress-based tool for threaded posts that the company calls its most important collaboration tool. The point isn’t the software. It’s that discussion happens in a searchable, permanent place rather than in DMs that vanish from view.
What good async writing looks like
Writing for async readers is a skill, and most people were never taught it. A few habits make a big difference:
- Lead with the ask. Put the decision you need, or the action you want, in the first line, with a deadline.
- Include the context. Assume the reader is in another time zone and can’t ping you for clarification for eight hours. Link the doc, the ticket, the data.
- Make it findable. Post in a public channel or shared doc, not a private message. GitLab’s handbook explicitly favours public channels over direct messages.
- Close the loop. When a decision is made, write it down where people will look for it, with who decided and why.
Documentation as infrastructure
Writing in the moment is half the job. The other half is maintaining a body of documentation that people can trust. That’s harder than it sounds, because documentation decays the moment it’s written.
GitLab’s answer is a “handbook-first” rule. When processes change, you update the handbook first and then announce the change with a link, rather than the other way around. That sounds bureaucratic. In practice it means new hires can onboard themselves, and nobody has to remember which Slack thread held the real answer.
Matt Mullenweg, Automattic’s CEO, laid out five levels of distributed work in 2020. At the lower levels, a company simply recreates the office online, with the same meetings and the same expectation that everyone is visible at once. At level three, the company is remote-first, with deliberate async processes and better tools. At level four, work is judged on output, written communication dominates, and decisions happen without everyone online at the same time. Most organizations that went remote in a hurry stalled at level two, which explains a lot of the burnout and the backlash.
Meeting hygiene: fewer, smaller, better
Meetings aren’t the enemy. Bad ones are. Shopify’s purge worked not because meetings vanished, but because it forced every team to decide which ones were worth rebuilding. NPR reported that the company saw strong compliance with its no-meeting Wednesdays and that Nejatian said people even began declining meetings he had called.
The rules most effective remote companies follow are simple:
- No agenda, no meeting. GitLab’s handbook asks for an agenda in a shared doc before the call, so people can add questions in advance or skip the meeting entirely.
- Default to optional. If someone only needs the outcome, they should get notes, not an invitation.
- Record and write it up. A recording plus a short summary lets colleagues in other time zones catch up without staying up late.
- Protect focus blocks. Whether it’s a no-meeting day or two-hour windows, give people uninterrupted time and defend it.
- Use sync for what it’s good at. GitLab lists urgent incidents, tricky troubleshooting, brainstorming, and building relationships as the right times to get on a call. Status updates almost never make the list.
Here’s the catch: cutting meetings without improving writing just moves the chaos into chat. Shopify seemed to understand this, pairing the purge with a push to leave large, noisy Slack channels and be more deliberate about where information goes.
Working across time zones
For Canadian teams, time zones are a domestic problem before they’re a global one. A team spread from Vancouver to Halifax spans four hours, and Newfoundland adds another half hour. Add a contractor in Europe and a customer in Asia and the shared working window can shrink to almost nothing.
A few practices make this manageable:
- Define overlap hours, then keep them light. A two- or three-hour window where everyone is reachable is enough for quick questions and the occasional call.
- Rotate the pain. If a recurring meeting must happen, alternate the time so it isn’t always the same people joining at 7 a.m. or 8 p.m.
- Write handoffs. Teams that follow the sun, such as support or incident response, need a short written handoff at the end of each shift: what’s open, what’s blocked, who owns it.
- Set response-time norms. Agree that a message doesn’t need an instant reply, and spell out what counts as urgent and how to escalate it.
The tool categories that matter
No tool fixes a culture, but the right categories of tools make good habits easier. Most well-run distributed teams use something from each of these buckets:
| Category | What it’s for |
|---|---|
| Wiki or handbook | The durable source of truth for processes, policies and decisions |
| Shared documents | Drafting proposals, agendas and meeting notes together |
| Threaded discussion | Longer debates and announcements that need to be searchable later (Automattic’s P2 is an example) |
| Chat | Quick questions and coordination; not where decisions should live |
| Async video | Short recorded walkthroughs and demos that replace a status meeting |
| Project tracking | Who owns what, by when, so nobody has to ask in a meeting |
The trap is adding tools faster than habits. If decisions are spread across chat, email, three doc platforms and a project tracker, the problem isn’t remote work. It’s that nobody agreed where things go.
What still needs to happen in person
Even the most committed remote companies bring people together. Shopify’s careers page describes its model as “digital by design,” with employees working wherever they work best but gathering in person for an annual summit in Toronto, hack days, and short “bursts” of in-person problem-solving a few times a year. Mullenweg’s level-three description includes annual meetups.
That tells you something. Async work is excellent for focused execution and for including people across time zones. It’s weaker at building trust between strangers and at resolving messy, emotional disagreements. Planning a few deliberate in-person moments is cheaper than trying to force those things through a video call.
A practical starter kit for your team
You don’t need to become GitLab to get most of the benefit. Try this over the next month:
- Audit your recurring meetings. Cancel them all on paper, then only restore the ones someone argues for, with an agenda.
- Pick one source of truth. Choose a wiki or shared drive for decisions and processes, and link to it instead of re-explaining in chat.
- Write a one-page team charter. Spell out overlap hours, expected response times, what counts as urgent, and where different kinds of discussion belong.
- Replace one status meeting with a written update. A weekly post with progress, blockers and next steps, plus comments, often works better than 30 minutes on a call.
- Schedule the in-person time. If your team is distributed, put a gathering on the calendar and protect the budget for it.
Remote and asynchronous collaboration rewards teams that are deliberate. Shopify’s calendar purge made headlines, but the lasting lesson is quieter: decide how your team communicates on purpose, write it down, and revisit it when it stops working.
Sources and further reading
- CNN: Shopify is clearing out recurring meetings from employee calendars (January 2023)
- NPR: Shopify deleted 322,000 hours of meetings
- Statistics Canada: Time use and teleworkers (June 2024)
- Statistics Canada: Has the COVID-19 pandemic changed commuting patterns for good?
- Government of Canada: Direction on prescribed presence in the workplace
- GitLab Handbook: How to embrace asynchronous communication
- GitLab Handbook: Communication
- Automattic: About
- Matt Mullenweg: Distributed work’s five levels of autonomy
- Shopify Careers: Digital by design
