In 2023, Shopify canceled every recurring meeting with more than two people on the calendar and instituted meeting-free Wednesdays company-wide, a purge public enough that employees described their calendars going nearly blank overnight. The policy read as a productivity win. It was also, immediately, a redistribution of whose time the company had decided to treat as expensive.
Attention behaves like a depletable resource with real switching costs, not a tap that turns on and off without loss. Every interruption carries a reorientation cost that never shows up in a single meeting's minutes but compounds steadily across a working day — the logic Shopify's leadership cited publicly for the purge.
Protecting focus for some roles means increasing latency for others. An engineer who works uninterrupted for three hours makes the person waiting on her answer sit idle — and roles built around synchronous responsiveness, like support, sales, and junior management, absorb that interruption cost more than roles seen as higher-leverage, which quietly re-ranks whose time the organization considers valuable, whether or not anyone states it that way.
As more companies formalize focus blocks the way Shopify and Basecamp have, the old norm of always being reachable is turning into a marker of low status rather than diligence — a reversal from a decade ago, when instant Slack replies signaled commitment.
The next wave of tooling is not about blocking notifications outright but about routing them — Slack's own urgency tags and scheduled-send features already let a sender decide, on the recipient's behalf, which interruptions are worth the cost. That is a manager's judgment call, delegated quietly to software.