Case Study: How a Remote Team Reduced Meeting Time by 40% with Calendar.live

Overview: We worked with Aurora Labs, a 65 person remote engineering company, to overhaul meeting culture and tooling. Within three months, they cut meeting hours by 40 percent and increased deep work time.

Tools alone do not change behavior. Tools enable culture shifts when combined with clear rules and leadership buy in.

Baseline and goals

Aurora Labs tracked an average of 28 meeting hours per engineer per week. The goals were to reduce meetings to under 18 hours per week, increase focus blocks, and improve meeting quality as measured by decision completion rate.

Approach

1. Introduce calendar rules: mandatory agendas for meetings over 30 minutes and templates for recurring meeting types.
2. Enable mandatory 30 minute daily focus blocks for engineers with meeting auto decline rules.
3. Use analytics to identify low value recurring meetings and replace or consolidate them.
4. Train leaders on facilitation and decision making to shorten meeting times.
5. Automate follow ups to ensure decisions become action items tracked outside meetings.

Implementation details

Calendar.live templates were created for weekly standups, sprint planning, and design reviews. Standups were shortened from 30 minutes to 15 minutes with strict time boxed items. Quarterly planning replaced some weekly syncs. Automation routed action items to a central task board with owner and due date fields automatically populated from meeting notes.

Results

• Meeting hours reduced by 40 percent within three months.
• Deep work time increased by an average of 6 hours per week per engineer.
• Decision completion rate within two weeks improved from 56 percent to 82 percent.
• Employee satisfaction with meeting load increased significantly in the internal pulse survey.

Key learnings

Automation alone is insufficient. A few cultural anchors made the difference: leadership modeling the rules, a short zero tolerance period for violating focus blocks, and visible analytics that made meeting waste tangible. The calendar features enabled these changes by making new behaviors easier to adopt.

Recommendations for other teams

• Start with a pilot team to validate rules and templates.
• Use analytics to measure before and after; data drives behavior change.
• Invest in facilitation training for meeting owners.
• Automate follow ups so meeting outcomes become manageable tasks.

Conclusion

Aurora Labs demonstrates that a combination of tooling, policy, and leadership can reclaim significant productivity. Calendar.live was a central enabler, but the cultural shift was the real catalyst. For teams struggling with too many meetings, this case offers a replicable playbook.