You may know roughly how much time you waste in meetings, but Shopify bosses think they've figured out how much money they waste in them.

In a memo sent to employees earlier this month, they announced they were giving them a new plug-in that syncs up to their calendars and attaches a dollar amount to each meeting of more than two people, based on attendees' hourly salary and the meeting's length.

This push to keep workers out of meetings is to free up time so they can, according to the company's COO, "get shit done." It's a productivity hack, and it's not the only company attempting it. Meta, Atlassian (which owns Trello), and Clorox all have no-meeting days on the calendar, Bloomberg reported.

But here's the thing about meetings, even "pointless" ones, and especially for a company with a lot of remote workers like Shopify: they give us an opportunity to chat. And right now, this may be more important than ever.

The Surgeon General has called loneliness in America an "epidemic" and said it could be as bad for you as smoking.

There are a bunch of potential reasons for this widespread loneliness, especially among young people. It could be to do with living in car-centric neighborhoods without much public space, or our social-media use, but ultimately what we're missing is meaningful social connections.

Enter: work friends.

Even before the pandemic, my best antidote to WFH loneliness has been a group chat made up entirely of former colleagues. This group has been described by one friend as "obscurely named, impenetrably injoked and your go-to for everything from fashion advice to AITA-type therapy." Yes, it's delightful. Yes, it's all thanks to people I've met in a work context.

According to a 2019 survey, workplaces were an adult's best shot at making new friends, The Independent reported. Of course, this was when "working from home" was mostly reserved for digital nomads and snow days. As of last month, 40% of workers are based at home at least part of the time.

Watercoolers are hard to recreate in virtual form, but if they're going to be anywhere, it's in scheduled videocalls — in other words, meetings. Ideally ones with a minimal agenda, so we can make, well, meaningful connections.

Better mental health has been closely linked to productivity, so perhaps addressing loneliness would be a better use of a company's resources than discouraging meetings. But as far as I know there's no plug-in for that.