Business leaders are sounding the alarm: Meetings have taken over and real work is being left behind. Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan is the latest to speak out about the phenomenon, arguing that many leaders mistake constant meetings for leadership.
“When you’re first starting out, it’s easy to confuse being busy with being in leadership meetings,” Jordan told a CEO panel last week. new york times DealBook Summit. “…I’m sure we’ve all discovered that there’s no time to ‘work’ and you confuse attending meetings with work.”
Over the years, Jordan’s solution has become increasingly simple: protect his time. In 2026, he aims to make the calendar completely clear for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday afternoons – preventing anyone from booking meetings during those times.
While he acknowledged that this approach might sound “crazy” to some executives, he said CEOs are hired to do a job that only they can do, and that rarely happens when they’re stuck in back-to-back meetings.
“That way you can do what you need to do. You can think about what’s important right now. You can call the people you need to talk to,” Jordan added.
This approach may pay off. Despite a tough year for the airline industry, Southwest Airlines posted a surprising profit in its most recent quarterly earnings report. Its shares are up about 23% so far this year.
wealth Southwest Airlines was contacted for further comment.
Jordan wasn’t the only one frustrated. Meetings have become a common pain point for employees and executives alike.
During the pandemic, meetings have almost taken on the role of emotional support—an attempt to replace the face-to-face interactions of lockdown. With no need to wait for a free conference room, the calendar fills up quickly.
But now, according to a 2024 Atlassian study of 5,000 employees across four continents, nearly 80% say they are inundated with so many meetings and calls that they have little time to get any real work done. About 72% of the time, meetings were deemed ineffective.
This backlash has prompted an increasing number of executives to aggressively cut (or eliminate) meetings from their company schedules, sometimes even carving out days dedicated to no meetings at all. Still, some experts warn that canceling meetings entirely is a tactic that can eliminate a sense of belonging to an organization and be counterproductive in the long run.
“Meetings don’t need to be canceled entirely. Only meetings that are inefficient and time-wasting need to be canceled entirely,” Ben Thompson, CEO and co-founder of Employment Hero, previously said wealth.
