Nobody repealed it. There was no meeting about ending it and no announcement. It was simply true in week two, mostly true in week five, and by week nine the people who were there when it was announced had stopped mentioning it, because mentioning it made them the difficult one. ...
A no-meeting day is not hard to announce and not hard to keep for a fortnight. It dies somewhere around week seven, from exceptions that were each individually reasonable and that nobody counted. So the rollout is mostly one thing: deciding what the exceptions are before anybody asks for one. Everything else — the announcement, the enforcement, the review — takes about ninety minutes of work in total. The exception list is what makes those ninety minutes hold. ...
The honest summary: one credible study of 76 large companies found that introducing no-meeting days improved autonomy, communication and satisfaction and reduced stress and micromanagement, with the best results at three days a week rather than one. It is a survey of companies that chose to do it, measured largely through pulse surveys, with no control group described. That is a real finding and a weak one, and almost everything written about the no meeting day overstates it. ...
A meeting policy that is still working in month three has three properties the ones that die do not. It is written down somewhere a new person finds it without asking. It has an exception process that existed before the first exception. And somebody senior has been visibly inconvenienced by it, in public, at least once. ...