Do No-Meeting Days Work?

The idea of a company-wide “no-meeting day” started as a bit of a rebellion. Jason Fried and the team at 37signals helped popularize it with a “Boycott a Meeting Day,” and the practice has since gone mainstream. Asana, Shopify, and Facebook have all run some version of protected, meeting-free time.

And the appeal is obvious. Knowledge work needs long, uninterrupted stretches (“maker time”), and a calendar sliced into back-to-back meetings destroys it. Blocking out a full day where no one can schedule a meeting gives people a reliable island of focus every week. If your team is drowning in meetings, a no-meeting day is a good intervention.

The best-known study says they work. In 2022, researchers writing in MIT Sloan Management Review surveyed 76 companies, each with more than 1,000 employees, that had introduced no-meeting days. With one meeting-free day a week, employees reported more autonomy, better communication, and higher engagement and satisfaction, along with less micromanagement and stress, and productivity rose.

A no-meeting day protects time from bad meetings without making any of them better.

Think of it like a recurring headache. Declaring one meeting-free day is like saying “I’ll just avoid the thing that gives me headaches once a week.” It helps, but it accepts that the other four days are going to hurt. The meetings don’t get better; they just get quarantined into the days that remain (often making those days even more crowded).

The lasting fix is in the meetings themselves. A meeting with a clear agenda, someone moderating, and good notes earns its place on the calendar, especially when every action item leaves the room with a name on it. Get that right and many of the meetings you were trying to escape get shorter or get folded into another one. Some disappear on their own.

Protect your no-meeting day. Then use the other four to run meetings worth attending. In Less Meeting, a timed agenda goes out with every invite, so people know what they’re walking into. Get started free with Less Meeting for 14 days, no credit card required.