Don’t just subtract meetings — redesign them.
. Imagine that all your meetings were cut by 50% along dimensions including number, length, and size. What would happen?
Both groups saved time, but the Full Doomsday group saved an average of five hours per person each month versus three hours for the light group. When we asked Gabrielle Adams about this difference, she suggested the “clean slate” approach nudged volunteers to slow down and think more deeply about whether meetings were necessary or if they could be redesigned — while people in the light group didn’t slow down as much.
One lesson from the Doomsday pilot was that people sometimes struggled to assess the value of each meeting. So, we developed a simple system for the Reset. Volunteers rated each recurring meeting on two dimensions on a three-point numerical scale:The value of each meeting for helping them reach their goals.
As a result, we built a model based on the Meeting Reset that predicted low-value meetings with over 80% accuracy. It considers factors including meeting length, size, day of the week, and title. Meetings on Mondays were rated as most valuable. Wednesday meetings, which coincided with Asana’s “No Meeting Wednesdays,” were least valuable, probably because people resented when colleagues violated the explicit company norm of not scheduling meetings on that day.