A practical post on the meeting culture inside our four-day-week operation. Most of the productivity recovery from a four-day week, in our experience, comes from the meeting changes. Worth being specific about what we did.
The starting point: when we transitioned in 2022, the calendar looked like most agency calendars. Standing meetings filling roughly 30-40% of the senior team's week. Client calls layered on top. Some genuine working time in the gaps.
The endpoint, three years in: roughly 10-15% of the senior team's week in meetings. Most of the recovered time goes to focused work. Some goes to the document-and-comment cycles that replaced what the meetings used to do.
The taxonomy we ended up with
We classified our recurring meetings into four categories. Each got a different default treatment.
Category 1 — Genuine alignment. Meetings where the participants needed to make a decision together that depended on real-time discussion. Pricing strategy, hiring decisions, complex client problem-solving. These stayed but were tightened. Default duration 30 minutes. Required agenda. Required documented outcomes.
Category 2 — Status updates. Meetings whose primary function was the reporting of progress from one team member to another or to a leader. Almost all of these went away. Replaced by a short written update in a shared doc, posted on a regular cadence. The leader reads when convenient. Questions are asked in comments. The meeting that used to take 30 minutes is now a five-minute writeup and a two-minute read.
Category 3 — Information-sharing. Meetings whose primary function was the dissemination of information from one person to many. Internal training, agency-wide updates, function-specific updates. Most of these became written-then-recorded — a written briefing first, with a recorded video version optional for those who prefer it. The meeting that used to require everyone to be online at the same time became a 20-minute read at people's own pace.
Category 4 — Social and cultural. Meetings whose primary function was relationship maintenance — team lunches, all-hands, social events. We kept these but reduced frequency and made attendance optional. The fortnightly all-hands that some of the team valued and others tolerated became monthly. Tea and biscuits in the small kitchen for the office-based team became less of an institution. People who wanted social time scheduled it explicitly.
The category split was useful because it clarified what each meeting was actually doing. Most meetings were a blend — partly status, partly alignment, partly information-sharing — and the blend hid what could have been done async. Naming the categories made the alternatives concrete.
The cancellation rules
Two rules that, in practice, did more than the taxonomy.
The "could this be a doc?" rule. Every standing meeting was challenged with the question: could this happen as a doc instead? If the answer was yes, the meeting was either eliminated or scheduled less frequently as a quarterly check-in. If the answer was genuinely no, the meeting kept its slot but had to defend its purpose.
The "no agenda, no meeting" rule. Calendar invites without an agenda were cancelled. Not always politely, in the early days. The rule was enforced even for senior team members. The result, after a few months: agendas became standard. People scheduled meetings only when they had a specific reason. Some standing meetings stopped being scheduled because the organiser couldn't articulate a current agenda.
These rules sound rigid. They produced a noticeably calmer week.
What replaced the meetings
The async equivalents that grew up to do the work the meetings used to do.
Decision documents. Most decisions of any consequence — campaign strategy, pricing, hiring, internal investments — get written up as decision documents. The doc states the decision required, the relevant context, the options, the recommendation, and the questions outstanding. Stakeholders read and comment async. Decisions are made in the document. Meetings happen only when the decision is genuinely contested and needs live conversation.
Project status hubs. Each significant project has a hub doc that's the canonical status of record. Updated by the project lead on a regular cadence. Anyone who needs to know where the project is reads the doc. The status meeting that used to update everyone in real time has been replaced by the doc.
Comment-and-resolve cycles. Most strategic conversations now happen as comment threads on documents. Someone proposes something. Others comment. The proposer iterates. Decisions are taken in the thread. The thread is the audit trail. The shape of the conversation is similar to what would have happened in a meeting; the timeline is asynchronous, the record is permanent.
Loom (or equivalent) videos for nuance. Some communications work better with voice and intonation than with text. For these, a quick recorded video — usually 5-10 minutes — gets sent to the relevant audience. The audience watches at their own pace. The information lands. The meeting it replaced would have required everyone to be online together for the same duration plus scheduling friction.
Office hours instead of standing meetings. Senior team members hold designated office hours rather than scheduled one-on-ones. The reports who need time can drop in during the office hours. The reports who don't, don't. The senior calendar isn't blocked for meetings that mostly turn into "nothing to discuss this week".
What this requires
A few preconditions worth being honest about.
The team has to be able to write. Async-first work assumes most people can write clearly enough that their colleagues understand them. Teams with strong writers have an easier time. Teams whose writing is weak struggle, because the friction of bad documents is higher than the friction of good meetings.
The team has to trust the process. The first time someone makes a decision in a doc instead of bringing it to a meeting, there's a moment of "is anyone actually reading this?" The trust has to be earned over time. Leaders signal it by making decisions in docs themselves and by explicitly not re-discussing things in meetings that were settled in documents.
Senior leaders have to defend the new defaults. Meeting culture drifts toward old norms unless someone is actively defending the new ones. The senior team has to be willing to push back on meeting requests that should be docs, to enforce the agenda rule, to cancel standing meetings whose purpose has eroded. Without this defence, the calendar fills back up.
The tools matter, but less than expected. We use Notion, Slack, Loom, and Google Docs. Most teams could run a similar pattern with whatever toolkit they already have. The thing that made the difference wasn't tooling choice — it was the cultural decision to use the tools as the default rather than meetings.
The numbers, roughly
Average senior team member time in meetings under the old model: roughly 14-16 hours a week.
Average senior team member time in meetings now: roughly 5-7 hours a week.
The difference — eight to ten hours of senior time recovered, per person, per week — is the single largest source of the productivity recovery from the four-day week. The four-day week didn't, on its own, produce this. The four-day week forced the meeting discipline that produced this. Without the meeting discipline, the four-day week would have failed. With it, the four-day week works comfortably.
If you're considering a four-day week and want to know what one specific operational change would do most to make it work: this is it. The meeting culture is where most of the recoverable time lives.