In recent years, Shopify cancelled all recurring meetings with more than two people to free up employees to work on other tasks. At Block, CEO Jack Dorsey declared Tuesdays a company?wide no?meeting day to shift the balance from \u201ctalking about work\u201d to actually doing it. Instagram head Adam Mosseri has vowed to cancel all recurring meetings every six months, adding back only ones that are \u201cabsolutely necessary.\u201d At Southwest Airlines, CEO Bob Jordan made a public declaration that meetings are not work. He blocks out some of his own afternoons from meetings. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, meanwhile, encouraged employees to \u201ckill meetings\u201d in his 2024 letter to shareholders.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Such actions may seem like an overzealous crusade against a fundamental\u2014if loathed\u2014feature of the modern workplace, but Rebecca Hinds, author of the new book Your Best Meeting Ever<\/em>, says these bosses might not be going far enough. The Stanford PhD, who has studied meetings for 15 years and advised nearly 100 companies, says that organizations could benefit from what she calls \u201cArmeetingeddon\u201d or a \u201cMeeting Doomsday\u201d\u2014tearing meetings down completely and starting from scratch.\u00a0<\/p>\n According to her research, individual contributors, managers, and executives spent an average of 3.7, 5.8, and 5.3 hours per week, respectively, in unproductive meetings in 2024\u2014an increase of 118%, 87%, and 51% since 2019.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAs knowledge workers, we spend 85 to 90% of our time collaborating,\u201d she says. \u201cThere\u2019s no activity that we spend more time on than meetings, and yet they\u2019re highly, highly dysfunctional.\u201d Meetings have assumed a starring role in workplaces\u2019 \u201cproductivity theater\u201d partly because they are so visible, she adds: \u201cThere\u2019s nothing that says you\u2019re 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.\u201d In organizations where the collective mission and individual goals are unclear, meetings have become a sort of status symbol\u2014\u201ca way to show progress, show productivity,\u201d Hinds says, calling that tendency \u201charmful.\u201d<\/p>\n Hinds\u2019s solution is to treat meetings as \u201cthe most important, most expensive, and most overlooked products in your entire organization,\u201d she writes in her book. An Armeetingeddon or a calendar cleanse is a good place to start. Hinds\u2019 former employer Dropbox famously pulled this off in 2013 when, \u201cin one sweeping move,\u201d Hinds writes, the IT department \u201cwiped recurring meetings from employees\u2019 calendars overnight.\u201d For weeks, only a few essential meetings were spared from the company\u2019s \u201cmeeting moratorium.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe relentless drumbeat of meetings vanished overnight, leaving behind something unfamiliar: uninterrupted time for employees to do their work,\u201d writes Hinds, who joined Dropbox the following year. In the \u201cmeeting Doomsdays\u201d Hinds has led, participants have reclaimed up to 11 hours per week\u2014gains with staying power, she writes.<\/p>\n But wiping calendars clean is only the first step. Hinds recommends rebuilding after a 48-hour \u201cmeeting detox,\u201d and only then adding back meetings that have real impact and are well-designed.\u00a0<\/p>\n Among her top tips for such meetings is taking the default meeting length\u2014be it 30 minutes or an hour\u2014and cutting it in half, creating a sense of urgency and the need for attendees to prepare. The same rule can apply to the invite list. In fact, Bain & Company research found that when a meeting includes more than seven people, decision quality drops by 10% per extra body.\u00a0<\/p>\n Still, meetings have a way of creeping back onto calendars, so leaders need to empower their employees to defend their time and decline meetings, which can feel awkward or even insulting to the organizer. Companies like Dropbox and GitLab have given employees pre-written scripts to politely decline, along the lines of: \u201cThanks for including me! I\u2019m wondering if we could try to solve this over email instead?\u201d<\/p>\n Hinds isn\u2019t surprised that so many CEOs are taking aim at meetings now: \u201cWe\u2019re living in this era of efficiency,\u201d she says. And when workers have fewer meetings, productivity often increases. Cooperation increases too \u201cbecause people are forced to find new, more intentional ways to communicate without meetings.\u201d At the same time, micromanagement is reduced because managers can no longer use meetings \u201cas surveillance tools for their team.\u201d<\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t have to come from the top: This is a good moment for the average employee to crack down on meetings too, as they face pressure to develop skills that make the best use of AI. \u201cWe know that so much of that is being done through personal experimentation and on personal time,\u201d Hinds says. \u201cWe 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\u2019s ability to execute.\u201d<\/p>\n That said, there\u2019s one innovation in meeting tech that Hinds is not a fan of: AI notetakers. She never uses them herself. The temptation to send a bot to a meeting, she says, is \u201ca sign to me that the meeting has not been intentionally designed.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Arrow #Button #Icon<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" CEOs have had it with meetings… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17748,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[3816,3817,624,3818,3777,1980],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17747"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17747\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Your-Best-Meeting-Ever-book-cover.jpg?format=webp&w=1440&q=100\"\/)
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