As chapter 5 shows, the Million Hours Campaign led by Pushkala Subramanian at pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca succeeded because it blended the two approaches to free up employees’ time. Top-down changes included adding steps before employees could “reply all” to more than twenty-five email recipients—users had to pause, read a warning, and do an extra click. That little speed bump saved employees from thousands of unnecessary emails.

We help leaders uncover and repair HIPPO problems by measuring two key behaviors. The first is talking time, how much the leader talks (versus other members). The second is the ratio of the questions the leader asks to the statements the leader makes. We worked with our Stanford colleague Kathryn Velcich to develop a “meeting audit,” which our students used to assess all-hands meetings at five early-stage start-ups.

When Rebecca launched Asana Labs in 2022, she was inspired by Armeetingeddon to recruit a small group of colleagues for a pilot program called Meeting Doomsday. All participants started by removing all standing meetings with five or fewer people from their calendars for forty-eight hours. They used the break to think about which meetings were valuable, deciding which to subtract, modify, or keep. As we detail later in this chapter, this prototype “meeting repair and removal” tool showed much promise. We worked with Rebecca to scale lessons from Meeting Doomsday to sixty employees who participated in the subsequent Meeting Reset program. We learned that people wanted a fine-grained but simple way to assess meetings. We asked them to use a three-point scale to rate how much effort each meeting required and its value for helping them achieve goals. Of over 1,100 standing meetings, those Asana employees rated more than 50 percent as low value and identified more than 150 that required great effort and had low value.

Appendix

“We wrote a friction article for Gallup.com, “Too Many Teams, Too Many Bosses,” and for Times Higher Education, “Our To-Do Lists Can’t Grow Forever. It’s Time to Try Subtraction.

And the LinkedIn pieces “Why Your Job Is Becoming Impossible to Do” and “How Do You End a Meeting?