Last October, our engineering team of fourteen people made a decision that felt radical at the time: we cancelled every recurring meeting on our calendar. Stand-ups, sprint planning, retros, one-on-ones with managers — all of them. We replaced them with short async video updates recorded through Spool each morning.
The first two weeks were uncomfortable
I'll be honest — the silence was disorienting. Engineers who had spent years calibrating their day around a 9:30 stand-up suddenly had three uninterrupted hours before lunch. We had to actively resist the pull back to real-time text and let the clips carry the context.