5 MINUTE SUNDAY · Every Sunday. One tip. Under 5 minutes.
You're running 12 meetings a week.
Three of them could be a Slack message.
Four of them don't need you in the room.
Two of them have no agenda and no outcome.
And YOU scheduled all of them.
— 01 — ONE LEADERSHIP TIP
The meeting didn't waste your time. The system that created it did.
Founders are great at adding meetings. They call syncs when there's uncertainty. They add themselves to calls "just to stay close." They run weekly check-ins that nobody cancels, even when there's nothing to discuss.
What they're bad at is questioning whether the meeting should exist at all.
Here's what's actually happening: meetings are how most leaders manage anxiety. When things feel unclear, a meeting feels productive. When you're worried about alignment, a sync feels like the solution. But a 45-minute call to get a yes or no isn't alignment — it's an expensive substitute for a decision-making structure that doesn't exist yet.
I've walked into companies where the CEO is in 60% of all meetings. Not because they need to be. Because nobody ever told them they didn't.
The real problem isn't the meeting. It's that meetings have replaced the system.
When your team knows what they're deciding, what they're not deciding, and what "good" looks like, they stop asking for meetings. When they don't know those things, every open question becomes a calendar invite.
The takeaway: Every recurring meeting you own is a question in disguise. The question is: why hasn't this been solved yet?
— 02 — ONE COMPANY WORTH KNOWING
Shopify — who in January 2023 did something almost no public company has done: they used a bot to purge every recurring meeting with three or more people from employee calendars overnight.
The result? 322,000 hours returned to their workforce in the months that followed. They also built a cost calculator to show employees what meetings actually cost — the average 30-minute meeting came out at $700–$1,600. So cancelling those events wasn't just a culture move. It was a financial one.
They didn't hire more people. They didn't restructure teams. They audited the meeting layer and removed it.
The lesson: Most of what's on your calendar is legacy infrastructure. It was added when things were unclear. It never got removed when they weren't.
— 03 — ONE THING TO ACT ON
Do this before next Sunday.
Open your calendar. Find every recurring meeting you own or attend.
For each one, answer one question: if this meeting disappeared tomorrow, what would break?
If the honest answer is "nothing", cancel it. If the answer is "we'd lose alignment on X", that's not a meeting problem. That's a documentation or decision-rights problem. Fix that instead.
You don't need to overhaul your calendar. You need to cancel two things this week and see what happens.
I did this exact audit with a Series B founder last quarter. We pulled 14 hours a week back from his calendar in two sessions. Not by saying no more, by building the structure that made most of those meetings unnecessary in the first place.
If that sounds like where you are — let's talk →
See you next Sunday.
— Alisa
Fractional COO · Executive Adviser · Keynote Speaker
Helping founders and senior leaders scale themselves, not just their business.
Ready to break through your leadership ceiling?
I work 1:1 with founders and senior leaders who are done being the bottleneck. Book a free 20-min call →
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