One Meeting Day Calendar Reset
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- —
Gray's prescription when a remote team complains it has no time to work. Mondays are treated as sacred — the freshest, most productive day of the week — and all meetings are sandwiched into a single Tuesday afternoon block of about five hours. Anything that does not fit gets deleted, at least as an experiment. He recommends cutting 50% of meetings for a fixed two-month window and only reinstating what people genuinely miss, replaced in the meantime by Loom videos, Slack channels and thorough written end-of-week updates the founder can read on their own schedule. The underlying accounting is that a one-hour meeting costs three hours — prep, meeting, and getting back into flow — and that a team of A-players in flow is the single most valuable thing you can get out of them.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Audit what the calendar is actually consuming
List every recurring commitment — all-hands, squad meetings, thinking blocks, level-up hours, office hours — and count how many full working days are left for deep work.
Pro tip Listen for the signal in team feedback: 'I've basically just got Thursdays to do my work' is a calendar problem, not an attitude problem.
Watch out A team with no space to go deep also has nothing to bring to leadership meetings, which reads falsely as disengagement.
- 2
Make Monday sacred
No meetings on Monday. People come back from the weekend rested with pent-up motivation; let them rip through work rather than slamming them into calls.
- 3
Sandwich every meeting into one afternoon
Put the team huddle, leadership meeting and commercial meeting into a single block — say Tuesday noon to 5pm — so the team has a day and a half of clear runway before syncing.
Pro tip Meeting after the runway means people arrive with real progress and real questions rather than plans.
- 4
Cap the block and cut what doesn't fit
Whatever cannot fit in those five hours gets removed. Ceremonial slots like a designated learning hour are the first candidates if the culture already hires constant learners.
- 5
Run a two-month 50% deletion experiment
Announce a fixed window — from this date to that date we're deleting half our meetings — then revisit at the end and decide which, if any, come back. If none need to, don't put any back.
Pro tip Survey the team before and after: which meetings must exist, what's missing, how do we keep culture intact without them.
Watch out You won't make everyone happy; some of this requires an executive decision rather than consensus.
- 6
Replace synchronous updates with written and async ones
Use a squad or team Slack channel and Loom instead of gathering everyone. Require a thorough written end-of-week update per person — who they spoke to, what they closed, what they're seeing, what's next week.
Pro tip Written updates are more thorough than spoken ones because the person has had time and space to think, and you can read them on a Sunday over breakfast.
- 7
Downgrade the all-hands to monthly
A weekly company-wide meeting is largely redundant with a functioning leadership meeting — leadership aligns, then each department briefs its own people. Monthly is enough.
Pro tip Keep manager one-to-ones on a fortnightly cadence; those are the ones worth protecting.
In the wild
Ali's fourteen-person remote team had Mondays entirely consumed by an all-hands, a commercial meeting and a content squad meeting; Wednesday afternoons went to a two-hour thinking block and a level-up hour; every other Friday was off; some people ran accelerator office hours and one filmed with Ali every Tuesday. Team members were reporting they effectively had Thursdays to do their work. Gray's proposed reset was Mondays sacred, everything sandwiched into Tuesday afternoon, the level-up hour deleted on the grounds that a team of constant learners does it anyway, and a fixed two-month experiment removing half the remaining meetings.
→ A calendar redesign that returns most of the week to deep work while keeping one real sync point.
Common mistakes
Costing a one-hour meeting as one hour
It is closer to three: preparing for it, attending it, then re-situating and getting back into flow afterwards. Priced at a notional hourly rate across six attendees, a single weekly meeting where you're pulling contributions out of people can run to thousands of pounds.
Putting meetings on Monday
Monday is when people return rested with the most pent-up motivation of the week. Filling it with calls spends the most productive day on the lowest-leverage activity and pushes real work to the tail end of the week.
A weekly all-hands on top of a leadership meeting
If the leadership meeting has genuinely aligned the system owners, a weekly company-wide meeting mostly re-transmits the same information. Departments can brief their own teams; the all-hands can drop to monthly without losing alignment.
From the transcript
“my only meeting day would be on Tuesdays I like Tuesdays because people are coming Fresh Off Their weekend and Mondays are sacred”
“guys you know from March 1 to May 1 we're going to delete 50% of our meetings and let's revisit what ones we then want…”
“because a 1our meeting is not 1 hours it's 3 hours”
From the episode
Scale Your Business From $10k to $100k Per Month - Matt Gray
Matt Gray