CEOs experienced it in meetings. They think they are unproductive time-wasters that clog their calendars and kill creativity. And we took drastic action to eliminate unnecessary brainstorming from the workplace.
In recent years, Shopify canceled all regularly scheduled meetings of three or more people to free up employees for other duties. At Block, CEO Jack Dorsey declared Tuesday a company-wide no-meeting day to shift the balance from “talking about work” to actually doing work. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri has vowed to cancel all semi-annual meetings and resume only those that are “absolutely necessary.” Bob Jordan, CEO of Southwest Airlines, has said publicly that meetings are not work. He doesn’t spend part of his afternoon attending meetings. Meanwhile, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon encouraged employees to “abolish meetings” in a letter to shareholders in 2024.
Such behavior may seem like an overreach against a fundamental (if hated) feature of the modern workplace, but Rebecca Hines, author of a new book, best meeting eversay these bosses may not be going far enough. The Stanford Ph.D., who has studied meetings for 15 years and advised about 100 companies, says organizations could benefit from what she calls “army tingeddon,” or “meeting apocalypse,” by dismantling meetings entirely and starting from scratch.
Her research shows that in 2024, independent contributors, managers, and executives will spend an average of 3.7 hours, 5.8 hours, and 5.3 hours per week in unproductive meetings, respectively, an increase of 118%, 87%, and 51% compared to 2019.
“As knowledge workers, we spend 85 to 90 percent of our time collaborating,” she says. “No activity takes up more time than meetings, yet they are so dysfunctional.” Meetings have become a staple of workplace “productivity theater” in part because they are so visible. “There’s nothing more important than being double-booked or triple-booked into a meeting. That’s why we focus on demonstrating productivity through meetings, rather than designing meetings to actually get things done,” she added. In organizations where collective missions and individual goals are unclear, meetings have become a kind of status symbol and “a way to demonstrate progress and productivity,” Hines said, a trend he called “toxic.”
Hines’ solution, she writes in her book, is to treat meetings as “the most important, most expensive, and most overlooked product in the entire organization.” A good place to start is with an Armeetingeddon or calendar cleanse. Hines’ former employer, Dropbox, famously implemented this scheme in 2013, when its IT department “overnight erased recurring meetings from employees’ calendars,” Hines wrote. For several weeks, the company’s “meeting pause” left only a few important meetings.
“The constant drumbeat of meetings disappeared overnight, and what was left behind was something unfamiliar: uninterrupted time for employees to do their work,” writes Hines, who joined Dropbox the following year. The Doomsday Conference, which Hines led, gave participants back up to 11 hours of time per week and gave them staying power, she wrote.
But wiping your calendar clean is just the first step. Hines recommends rebuilding after a 48-hour “meeting detox” and then adding in well-designed meetings that actually work.
One of her main tips for meetings like this is to cut the default meeting time in half to 30 minutes or an hour to give attendees a sense of urgency and a need to prepare. The same rules apply to invitation lists. In fact, a Bain & Company study found that when more than seven people participate in a meeting, the quality of decisions decreases by 10% for each additional person.
Still, meetings tend to creep into calendars, so leaders need to ensure employees are able to protect their time and decline meetings, which can feel awkward or even insulting to organizers. Companies like Dropbox and GitLab give employees pre-written scripts to politely decline by saying, “Thank you for participating. I was wondering if we could resolve your issue via email instead?”
Hines is not surprised that so many CEOs are now zeroing in on meetings. “We live in an era of efficiency,” she says. And when employees have fewer meetings, productivity often increases. Collaboration will also increase “as people are forced to find new, more intentional ways to communicate without meetings.” At the same time, micromanagement is reduced because managers can no longer use meetings “as a team monitoring tool.”
It doesn’t have to come from the top. As we face pressure to develop skills to make the most of AI, now is a good time for the average employee to crack down on meetings. “We know that a lot of it is done in personal experiments and on personal time,” Hines said. “We have an obligation to think about some of the time we can get back.” [and devote] Work on things that will truly advance our own careers and improve our organization’s ability to execute. ”
That said, there’s one innovation in conferencing technology that Hines isn’t too fond of. It’s an AI note taker. She herself never uses them. The temptation to send a bot into a meeting “is a sign that the meeting was not intentionally designed,” she says.
