In the AI era, optimizing meetings could be your company’s competitive advantage

CEOs are fed up with meetings, viewing them as unproductive time sinks that clutter schedules and stifle creativity. Consequently, they’ve implemented drastic measures to eliminate unnecessary brainstorming sessions.

In recent years, companies like , which has more than two people, have aimed to free up employees for other tasks. At , CEO Jack Dorsey has advocated for a shift from “talking about work” to actually doing it. , adding back only those meetings that are “absolutely necessary.” At , . He personally blocks out some of his afternoons to avoid meetings. Meanwhile, CEO Jamie Dimon has encouraged employees .

While these actions might appear to be an extreme campaign against a fundamental, albeit disliked, aspect of the modern workplace, Rebecca Hinds, author of the new book , suggests that these executives might not be going far enough. Hinds, a Stanford PhD who has dedicated 15 years to studying meetings and has advised nearly 100 companies, proposes that organizations could benefit from what she terms “Armeetingeddon” or a “Meeting Doomsday”—a complete dismantling of current meeting practices to start anew.

Her research indicates that in 2024, individual contributors, managers, and executives spent an average of 3.7, 5.8, and 5.3 hours per week, respectively, in unproductive meetings. This represents an increase of 118%, 87%, and 51% since 2019.

“As knowledge workers, we spend 85 to 90% of our time collaborating,” Hinds states. “There’s no activity that we spend more time on than meetings, and yet they’re highly, highly dysfunctional.” She explains that meetings have become a prominent feature of workplaces’ “productivity theater” largely due to their visibility: “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 where the collective mission and individual goals are unclear, meetings have evolved into a status symbol—“a way to show progress, show productivity,” Hinds notes, labeling this trend as “harmful.”

Hinds’s proposed solution is to treat meetings as “the most important, most expensive, and most overlooked products in your entire organization,” as she writes in her book. An “Armeetingeddon” or a calendar cleanse is a practical starting point. Hinds’s former employer, , famously executed such a strategy in 2013 when, “in one sweeping move,” according to Hinds, the IT department “wiped recurring meetings from employees’ calendars overnight.” For several weeks, only a select few essential meetings were exempt 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 year. In the “meeting Doomsdays” she has facilitated, participants have regained up to 11 hours per week—a benefit that has proven to be lasting, she reports.

However, clearing calendars is merely the initial phase. Hinds recommends rebuilding after a 48-hour “meeting detox,” and only then reintroducing meetings that offer genuine impact and are thoughtfully designed.

Among her key recommendations for effective meetings is to halve the default meeting duration, whether it’s 30 minutes or an hour, thereby fostering a sense of urgency and encouraging attendees to prepare. This principle can also be applied to the attendee list. Indeed, research from Bain & Company indicates that when a meeting involves more than seven people, decision quality diminishes by 10% for each additional participant.

Nevertheless, meetings have a tendency to reappear on calendars, necessitating that leaders empower their employees to protect their time and decline meetings, which can be perceived as awkward or even offensive to the organizer. Companies such as Dropbox and GitLab have provided employees with pre-written scripts for polite refusals, similar to: “Thanks for including me! I’m wondering if we could try to solve this over email instead?”

Hinds is not surprised by the current trend of CEOs targeting meetings: “We’re living in this era of efficiency,” she observes. When employees have fewer meetings, productivity often sees an increase. Cooperation also improves “because people are forced to find new, more intentional ways to communicate without meetings.” Simultaneously, micromanagement decreases as managers can no longer utilize meetings “as surveillance tools for their team.”

This initiative doesn’t solely need to originate from leadership; it’s an opportune moment for the average employee to also scrutinize their meeting habits, especially given the pressure to develop skills that leverage AI effectively. “We know that so much of that is being done through personal experimentation and on personal time,” Hinds remarks. “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 said, Hinds expresses reservations about one particular meeting technology innovation: AI notetakers. She personally avoids using them, stating that the temptation to send a bot to a meeting is “a sign to me that the meeting has not been intentionally designed.”