CEOs Are Declaring War on Meetings in 2026 – Here’s What’s Actually Happening

March 11, 2026 · 7 min read

Something has shifted in the executive suite. After years of employees complaining about meeting overload, the people with the power to actually change it are finally stepping in — and they’re not being subtle about it.

Shopify canceled all recurring meetings with more than two people across the entire company. Block CEO Jack Dorsey declared Tuesdays a company-wide no-meeting day. Instagram head Adam Mosseri vowed to purge all recurring meetings every six months, adding back only the ones that are “absolutely necessary.” Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan publicly declared that meetings are not work and started blocking his own afternoons from meetings. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon encouraged employees to “kill meetings” in his 2024 annual letter to shareholders.

This isn’t a trend piece about a few quirky startups experimenting with calendar hygiene. These are some of the largest, most influential companies in the world — and their leaders are putting meeting culture reform at the center of their operational strategy.

The question is: why now, and is it working?

Why the C-Suite Finally Cares

Meetings have been a productivity problem for decades. The data has been clear for years: unproductive meetings cost U.S. businesses an estimated $37 billion to $399 billion annually, depending on the study. The average employee spends 392 hours per year in meetings. Time wasted in unproductive meetings has doubled since 2019 to 5 hours per week.

So why are CEOs acting now?

The answer, according to Rebecca Hinds — a Stanford PhD who has studied meetings for 15 years and advised nearly 100 companies — is that we’re “living in this era of efficiency.” Hinds, author of the book “Your Best Meeting Ever,” notes that the pressure to do more with less has made meeting costs impossible to ignore any longer. When companies are scrutinizing every line item, the meeting budget — which can easily reach millions of dollars at large organizations — finally gets the same scrutiny as software licenses and headcount.

The numbers from Hinds’ own research underscore the urgency. She found that 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 — an increase of 118%, 87%, and 51% since 2019. Unproductive meeting time hasn’t just grown; it has more than doubled for individual contributors in five years.

Meanwhile, Hubstaff’s 2026 Global Benchmarks Report found that the average person is now sitting in twice as many meetings per year compared to just two years ago, and the typical organization is running almost six times as many meetings. The average employee gets just two to three hours of focus time per day — meaning uninterrupted work periods without meetings, messages, or tool switching.

At some point, the math becomes undeniable. And for CEOs focused on efficiency, profitability, and competitive advantage, the meeting calendar is one of the biggest, most visible levers they can pull.

What Companies Are Actually Doing

The approaches vary, but they share a common philosophy: stop treating meetings as the default and start treating them as an expense that must justify itself.

Shopify’s “Meeting Purge.” In January 2023, Shopify took the most aggressive approach of any major company, canceling all recurring meetings with more than two people — affecting over 10,000 employees. The move was part of a broader push to refocus the company on building rather than talking. Employees were told to rebuild their calendars from scratch, adding back only meetings they could justify. The company also established “No Meeting Wednesdays” and restricted meetings with more than 50 people to a single six-hour window on Thursdays.

Block’s No-Meeting Tuesdays. Jack Dorsey instituted a company-wide no-meeting day to shift the balance from “talking about work” to doing it. The policy applies to internal meetings across the organization, freeing up an entire day for focused execution.

Instagram’s Six-Month Reset. Adam Mosseri’s approach treats recurring meetings as inherently temporary. By purging all recurring meetings every six months and requiring them to be re-justified, the policy prevents the slow accumulation that plagues most organizations — where meetings created for a specific purpose persist indefinitely after that purpose has been served.

Dropbox and GitLab’s Decline Scripts. Both companies recognized that meeting culture doesn’t change just by telling people to have fewer meetings — you also have to make it socially safe to say no. They provided employees with pre-written scripts to politely decline meeting invitations, such as: “Thanks for including me! I’m wondering if we could try to solve this over email instead?” This removes the awkwardness of declining and normalizes the behavior.

What the Research Says About Results

The data on meeting reduction consistently shows positive outcomes — and the magnitude is often larger than leaders expect.

The MIT Sloan Management Review study of 76 companies found that introducing one meeting-free day per week increased productivity by 35% and reduced stress significantly. Two meeting-free days boosted productivity by 71%. Three meeting-free days produced the best overall results, with productivity up 73%, cooperation up 55%, and micromanagement down 68%.

Research cited by Dr. Steven Rogelberg at the University of North Carolina found that organizations that make meeting costs visible — displaying what each meeting costs in salary terms — see a 22% reduction in meeting time within 90 days. The behavioral economics explanation is straightforward: when costs are abstract, they don’t register in decision-making. When they’re concrete and present at the moment of scheduling, they do.

Companies that have leaned into async-first communication have seen even more dramatic shifts. GitLab, operating with over 1,300 employees fully remote, maintains an average of 8 meeting hours per week per employee — less than half the industry average — by defaulting to written communication for status updates, decisions with clear options, and brainstorming.

Read AI reports that teams using their platform attend 20% fewer meetings with 33% fewer attendees per meeting, because the ability to catch up asynchronously via AI-generated summaries eliminates the need for “just in case” attendance.

The Backlash and the Nuance

Not everyone is cheering. The meeting reduction movement has its critics, and some of their concerns are valid.

Rebecca Hinds herself pushes back on one popular piece of meeting technology: AI notetakers. She argues that the temptation to send a bot to a meeting in your place is “a sign to me that the meeting has not been intentionally designed.” If a meeting can be fully captured by an AI summary, it probably didn’t need real-time attendance — and the solution isn’t to send a robot, it’s to cancel the meeting and communicate the information asynchronously.

There’s also a legitimate concern that meeting reduction, if done badly, creates a different problem: isolation. Atlassian’s research found that while 44% of workers say meetings are their go-to method for team connection, 55% report feeling lonely at work even on days packed with meetings. Meetings, it turns out, aren’t particularly good at building connection. Only 17% of workers said meetings actually create a sense of connection, compared to 45% who cited working through challenging projects together.

The implication is that reducing meetings doesn’t cause isolation — bad meetings were never solving it in the first place. But organizations that cut meetings need to be intentional about replacing the connection function with something that actually works: collaborative work, social events, and one-on-ones.

What This Means for Your Team

You don’t need to be a Fortune 500 CEO to apply these lessons. The same principles work at any scale.

Start by making your meeting costs visible. Use a tool like Meeting Price Tag to show your team what their meetings actually cost. When a weekly team sync shows up as $18,000 per year on screen, the conversation about whether it’s worth it becomes a lot more concrete.

Then take one action from the CEO playbook: cancel your lowest-value recurring meeting this week. Just one. See what happens. In almost every case, nothing bad will happen — and your team will have one more hour of focus time to do the work that actually matters.