Boundaries and expectations set early protect time and focus
Take a moment and reflect on how strong your boundaries were throughout 2025. Anytime is a good time to reflect and reset boundaries, and January is even better!
Consider this...
On the first working day of 2023, Shopify hit delete on thousands of meetings. The company automatically cancelled all recurring meetings with more than two people, reinstated a rule of no meetings on Wednesdays, and corralled any 50+ person meetings into a single six-hour window on Thursdays. Within weeks, time spent in meetings fell by about a third. By mid-May, COO Kaz Nejatian reported Shopify was on track to reclaim roughly 322,000 hours that year and ship about 25% more projects, supported by a meeting cost calculator that displayed the estimated dollar cost before you pressed send on an invite. The message was unmistakable: boundaries and expectations set early protect time and focus, and they scale. (1 and 2)
Why does this story matter for middle managers? Because what Shopify did on day one of a new operating rhythm mirrors what great managers do in their first weeks with a team. They set guardrails for time, attention and decision rights, then reinforce them consistently. The result is less calendar noise, crisper execution and more energy for the work that actually moves the needle.
You can interpret early as your first day on the job, or the first day of the work year, or quarter! Don’t wait for a new role, to decide to protect time and supercharge focus.
First 30 Day Boundary Matrix
Your aim in the first 30 days is to reach protected focus. Do it in four moves:
co-create norms and quiet hours,
publish explicit expectations and SLAs,
reserve team-wide meeting-free blocks, then
review and reset weekly.
Shopify’s reset shows the power of a decisive start followed by visible reinforcement. (2)
The burger metaphor that makes it stick
Use the High-Performing Leadership Burger to teach the why behind the boundaries:
The evidence that boundaries work
Independent research backs Shopify’s results. A multi-company study published in MIT Sloan Management Review (3) found that introducing meeting-free days increased autonomy, engagement and productivity while reducing stress and micromanagement. Organisations experimenting with three meeting-free days often saw the strongest gains.
If-then planning also helps boundaries stick. Forming simple rules such as, “If it is Tuesday to Thursday, 1pm to 4 pm, then no meetings”, improves goal attainment with a medium to large effect size, according to a meta-analysis by Gollwitzer and Sheeran (4). When teams adopt these clear implementation intentions, behaviour follows.
What happens if you delay or avoid boundaries
Delay boundary-setting and you invite role ambiguity, meeting creep and attention debt. Calendars fill by default and by others more than you. Decision-making slows. Stress rises. In contrast, clear early expectations plus consistent reinforcement free up craft time, which is what most teams are hired to deliver.
Final thought
Shopify’s calendar purge was not a gimmick. It was an early, explicit commitment to protect time and focus, backed by data and by visible nudges. Middle managers can do the same on a smaller stage. Set the boundaries early, keep them visible, and you will compound time, attention and trust.
Source:
1.https://www.fastcompany.com/90888605/shopify-exec-this-is-what-happened-when-we-canceled-all-meetings (Fast Company)
3. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-surprising-impact-of-meeting-free-days/
4. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0065260106380021
