May 14, 2026 · Jason Madhosingh

Meetings Are a Bug: What Shopify and Microsoft Now Admit

A Shopify COO called meetings a bug. Microsoft's CEO calls it digital debt. A Wall Street partner admits to fake calendar blocks. The corporate world has already conceded the point.

The argument is over.

Shopify killed 12,000 recurring meetings overnight. Microsoft's CEO calls the resulting pileup "digital debt." A Wall Street partner publicly admitted in Business Insider that he books fake calendar blocks to find think time. The corporate world has already conceded that the modern meeting culture is structurally broken.

What it has not yet figured out is what to do about lunch specifically. That is what the rest of this article is about.

The Three Admissions That Matter

1. Shopify, January 2023: "Meetings are a bug."

On the morning of January 3, 2023, ~11,600 Shopify employees came back from the holiday break, opened their calendars, and found them empty. The night before, the company's IT team had run a script that deleted every recurring meeting with three or more attendees across the entire org — roughly 12,000 events, an estimated 76,500 hours.

COO Kaz Nejatian's memo to the company put the case plainly:

"No one joined Shopify to sit in meetings. Not one person has ever thought, 'you know what will make a big impact on entrepreneurship? Day after day of back to back meetings.' People join Shopify to build. To make cool shit. To see the thing they had their hands on get released so they can say, 'whoa, I made that.' Meetings are a bug along that journey."

CEO Tobi Lütke gave the rationale to Fortune:

"The best thing founders can do is subtraction. It's much easier to add things than to remove things. If you say yes to a thing, you actually say no to every other thing you could have done with that period of time."

Sources: Fortune, 2023-01-03; LA Times, 2023-01-04; UNLEASH, 2023. The reported result: meeting time per employee dropped 33% in the first two months versus the same period in 2022.

That is a CEO and COO of a $50B+ public company saying meetings are a bug to be eliminated, not a process to be optimized. Read it twice.

2. Microsoft, 2023: "We're all carrying digital debt."

Microsoft has been measuring this from inside its own product. In the 2023 Work Trend Index annual report (direct PDF), CEO Satya Nadella named the phenomenon:

"There's an enormous opportunity for AI-powered tools to help alleviate digital debt, build AI aptitude, and empower employees."

The numbers Microsoft published alongside:

57% of Microsoft 365 user time is communication (meetings, email, chat). Only 43% is creating.
Number of meetings per week up 153% globally for the average Teams user since the start of the pandemic.
Tentative meeting RSVPs up 216%. Outright declines up 84%.
People are in 3x more Teams meetings and calls per week (192%) since February 2020.

And from 2020, also at the Wall Street Journal CEO Council, Nadella named the brain-science version directly:

"Thirty minutes into your first video meeting in the morning, because of the concentration one needs to have in video, you are fatigued."

When the company whose product runs the most meetings on Earth tells you the meeting load is making people sick, the argument is over.

3. Wall Street, June 2025: "I block fake meetings for deal work."

In a Business Insider piece titled "These Wall Street pros are busier than ever. See their top efficiency secrets — from fake calendar blocks to saying 'no,'" Jeff Akers, Partner and Head of Secondary Investments at Adams Street Partners ($58B AUM), went on the record:

"My calendar just fills up. Nearly every minute of every day is taken. Being a leader means being able to step back and make sure you're doing the right things, and not just dealing with a firehose coming at you. Every Tuesday and Thursday, I block time on my calendar for 'deal work.' It's not actually reserved for a specific deal, but it ensures I have time to take a step back, assess and prioritize my list of to-dos, and think about what's going on more broadly in our industry."

Source: Business Insider, 2025-06-20.

The technique is calendar camouflage. The block is real time on Akers' calendar. The label ("deal work") is fictional in the sense that no specific deal is attached to the slot. Coworkers see a business commitment and route around it.

The piece quoted 13 other senior Wall Street executives on related tactics: hard 4-slide caps on internal meetings, blocked time to think, the discipline of declining meetings without a justification. The pattern is consistent across the industry.

What All Three Admissions Have in Common

The corporate calendar is now a defensive structure, not a coordination tool. The people who succeed in it are the ones who treat it that way.

Shopify defended its calendars by killing meetings at the organizational level. Microsoft defended by naming the problem in its public research and selling a product (Copilot) positioned as the answer. Akers and his Wall Street peers defended at the individual level with fake blocks.

The common thread: none of them solved this by labeling things honestly. Shopify did not invite people to "decline meetings if you'd like." It deleted the meetings unilaterally. Microsoft did not just tell employees to take breaks. It built a UX layer around protecting focus time. Akers does not block "personal time" — he blocks "deal work."

The honest label loses. The structural defense wins.

Why Lunch Specifically

The meeting-overload problem hits hardest at the one window of the day people most need protected: the midday break.

Per ezCater's 2023 Lunch Report, 48% of US workers skip lunch at least once a week. The 2025 follow-up moved that number to 51%. The proximate cause for 20% is "too many meetings." Among workers with 5+ daily meetings, the share blaming meetings rises to 34%.

Only 29% of workers block lunch on their calendar at all. Of those who do, 62% report being unable to actually use the time for a meal — the block fails.

This is the gap the Shopify-Microsoft-Wall-Street admissions reveal: the corporate world has accepted that meetings are a structural problem, but the individual-level fix (camouflaged blocks) is still mostly something people do quietly, by hand, on Sunday nights.

What to Do

There are three legitimate options.

Option 1: Run a Shopify-style purge

If you have the organizational authority, do what Shopify did. Delete recurring meetings in bulk. Default meeting length to 25 minutes. Cap meetings of 50+ to one slot per week. Make Wednesdays meeting-free.

The Shopify research suggests this drops meeting time per employee by 30%+ within two months. The cost is two weeks of organizational discomfort during the transition. Most executives do not have the authority to do this; the ones who do should.

Option 2: Adopt the Akers tactic manually

Block your lunch hour as a recurring "Vendor Sync" or "1:1 Product Review" or "Pipeline Review" on your own calendar. Vary the title weekly. Vary the duration. Shift the start time by 15 minutes day to day so no pattern emerges.

This is what Akers does, what Cal Newport calls "deep scheduling," and what a decade of Reddit threads from r/sysadmin and r/UnethicalLifeProTips document people doing manually. It works, at an effectiveness rate around 85% per our internal research.

The cost is about 10 minutes per week of attention. The benefit is that nobody books over your lunch.

Option 3: Automate it

CovertLunch is a Chrome extension that does Option 2 automatically. It writes one to three realistic-looking calendar events into your defined lunch window each morning. Titles vary daily, durations vary, start times shift. There is no branding — the events look indistinguishable from real meetings on your calendar.

Effectiveness rises to ~95% because the daily variation kills the pattern-recognition that even manually-varied blocks eventually develop. Local-only Chrome extension — nothing leaves your browser. $29.99 lifetime.

Try CovertLunch free for 7 days →

What the Admissions Do Not Yet Cover

The Shopify purge did not address lunch specifically. The Microsoft research does not single out the midday hour as the highest-leverage block. The Akers quote is about think time, not lunch.

The lunch hour is the last and most-violated of the protected windows. The same techniques work; the same defenses hold. But the cultural permission to defend lunch the way Lütke defended Shopify's calendar — by deleting meetings — does not yet exist.

Until it does, the individual-level tactic (camouflage + daily variation) is the working answer.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Shopify actually delete 12,000 meetings overnight?

Yes. Shopify's COO Kaz Nejatian publicly confirmed the calendar purge in a January 2023 memo. The figure ~12,000 events was reported by Fortune, the LA Times, and confirmed by Shopify's director of EMEA partnerships in WorkLife News coverage.

Is "fake calendar blocks" actually a recommended technique?

It is at least an admitted-on-the-record technique by named senior executives. Whether your company culture treats it as legitimate is a different question. In our research, no company employee handbook we reviewed prohibits naming a personal calendar block whatever the user wants to name it.

Does Microsoft's "digital debt" research apply to lunch?

The Microsoft Work Trend Index covers focus-time depletion broadly, including back-to-back meeting density and the brain-scan evidence on video-call fatigue. Lunch hour falls into the same category as focus time in their research — protected windows that get violated by meeting density.

What's the difference between camouflage and lying?

The calendar event is real. You scheduled it with yourself. The only fictional element is the implied subject of the meeting, which is no different from a doctor's appointment titled "personal" instead of "therapy." The deception is in implied priority, not in factual content.

Why doesn't every company just do what Shopify did?

Most executives do not have the unilateral authority to delete 12,000 calendar events across an org. Even those who do face two weeks of organizational discomfort during the transition. The individual-level technique works without requiring that authority.