CEOs have had it with meetings. They see them as unproductive time-sucks that clog up calendars and sap creativity. And they’ve taken drastic motion to rid their workplaces of pointless brainstorms.
In latest years, Shopify cancelled all recurring meetings with greater than two folks to unlock staff to work on different duties. At Block, CEO Jack Dorsey declared Tuesdays an organization‑vast no‑assembly day to shift the stability from “talking about work” to truly doing it. Instagram head Adam Mosseri has vowed to cancel all recurring meetings each six months, including again solely ones which might be “absolutely necessary.” At Southwest Airlines, CEO Bob Jordan made a public declaration that meetings will not be work. He blocks out some of his personal afternoons from meetings. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, in the meantime, inspired staff to “kill meetings” in his 2024 letter to shareholders.
Such actions could look like an overzealous campaign in opposition to a elementary—if loathed—function of the trendy office, however Rebecca Hinds, writer of the new guide Your Best Meeting Ever, says these bosses might not be going far sufficient. The Stanford PhD, who has studied meetings for 15 years and suggested practically 100 firms, says that organizations may gain advantage from what she calls “Armeetingeddon” or a “Meeting Doomsday”—tearing meetings down utterly and ranging from scratch.
According to her analysis, particular person contributors, managers, and executives spent a median of 3.7, 5.8, and 5.3 hours per week, respectively, in unproductive meetings in 2024—a rise of 118%, 87%, and 51% since 2019.
“As knowledge workers, we spend 85 to 90% of our time collaborating,” she says. “There’s no activity that we spend more time on than meetings, and yet they’re highly, highly dysfunctional.” Meetings have assumed a starring function in workplaces’ “productivity theater” partly as a result of they’re so seen, she provides: “There’s nothing that says you’re more important than being double- or triple-booked for a meeting, so we orient around showing productivity through meetings, as opposed to actually designing the meeting to move things forward.” In organizations the place the collective mission and particular person objectives are unclear, meetings have develop into a kind of standing image—“a way to show progress, show productivity,” Hinds says, calling that tendency “harmful.”
Hinds’s resolution is to deal with meetings as “the most important, most expensive, and most overlooked products in your entire organization,” she writes in her guide. An Armeetingeddon or a calendar cleanse is an effective place to start out. Hinds’ former employer Dropbox famously pulled this off in 2013 when, “in one sweeping move,” Hinds writes, the IT division “wiped recurring meetings from employees’ calendars overnight.” For weeks, just a few important meetings have been spared from the company’s “meeting moratorium.”
“The relentless drumbeat of meetings vanished overnight, leaving behind something unfamiliar: uninterrupted time for employees to do their work,” writes Hinds, who joined Dropbox the following yr. In the “meeting Doomsdays” Hinds has led, members have reclaimed as much as 11 hours per week—good points with endurance, she writes.
But wiping calendars clear is just the first step. Hinds recommends rebuilding after a 48-hour “meeting detox,” and solely then including again meetings which have actual impression and are well-designed.
Among her prime suggestions for such meetings is taking the default assembly size—be it half-hour or an hour—and chopping it in half, creating a way of urgency and the want for attendees to organize. The identical rule can apply to the invite record. In truth, Bain & Company analysis discovered that when a gathering contains greater than seven folks, determination high quality drops by 10% per further physique.
Still, meetings have a method of creeping again onto calendars, so leaders have to empower their staff to defend their time and decline meetings, which may really feel awkward and even insulting to the organizer. Companies like Dropbox and GitLab have given staff pre-written scripts to politely decline, alongside the strains of: “Thanks for including me! I’m wondering if we could try to solve this over email instead?”
Hinds isn’t shocked that so many CEOs are taking purpose at meetings now: “We’re living in this era of efficiency,” she says. And when employees have fewer meetings, productiveness usually will increase. Cooperation will increase too “because people are forced to find new, more intentional ways to communicate without meetings.” At the identical time, micromanagement is diminished as a result of managers can not use meetings “as surveillance tools for their team.”
It doesn’t have to return from the prime: This is an effective second for the common worker to crack down on meetings too, as they face stress to develop expertise that make the greatest use of AI. “We know that so much of that is being done through personal experimentation and on personal time,” Hinds says. “We owe it to ourselves to think about those pockets of time that we can take back [and devote] to the things that are truly going to advance our own career and improve our organization’s ability to execute.”
That mentioned, there’s one innovation in assembly tech that Hinds isn’t a fan of: AI notetakers. She by no means makes use of them herself. The temptation to ship a bot to a gathering, she says, is “a sign to me that the meeting has not been intentionally designed.”
