CNBC.COMMeeting bloat can be a problem at every level of an organization, from the lowest rung of the corporate ladder to the C-suite.
At the latter end of that spectrum is Bob Jordan. The Southwest Airlines CEO is trying to manage his own meeting overload in 2026 by keeping his Wednesday, Thursday and Friday afternoons blocked off for work, without meetings.
"I think when you first start, it's easy to confuse busyness and going to meetings with leadership, and it's not leadership," Jordan said in a roundtable discussion at The New York Times' DealBook Summit on Dec. 3. "I put more and more of my calendar to blank time over the years. I'm trying to in 2026, y'all are going to think I'm crazy, to hold the afternoons of Wednesday to Friday completely open."
Jordan says the idea is to have protected time when "you can work on things you need to work on, you can think about what's important right now, you can call people you need to talk to." Some of his mentors who are former CEOs have encouraged him to block off time for work, he added.
"What we all find, I'm sure, is there's no time to 'work' and you confuse going to meetings with the work," Jordan said. "The most important thing that is the work is what you're doing for the company that only you can do. And if you don't create time to do that, you're just grinding and then you're grinding on the weekends and you're grinding at night, and next week starts and next week starts."
In the same roundtable discussion, PayPal CEO Alex Chriss talked about the value of saying no in time management.
There are constantly chances to meet with employees, customers and potential partners that, while "great opportunities," he noted, "could fill up five days, every day."
"I think the thing that would probably surprise people the most is how often we say no," Chriss said. "I say no so often to try to stick to the rigor and the discipline of what is actually most important in the moment right now."
Too many meetings on your calendar can mean "you no longer have sufficiently long uninterrupted blocks to actually make progress on the things you're talking about in the meetings," Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University and author of several books on focus and productivity, previously told CNBC Make It.
A Microsoft report from June found that half of all meetings take place between 9 to 11 a.m. and 1 to 3 p.m., when many people are at their most productive but are instead spending the time on calls.
Newport recommends blocking out periods of at least 60 to 90 minutes at a time on your calendar for deep work, meaning the tasks that are most cognitively demanding, and turning off notifications — and avoiding meetings — during that time to work uninterrupted.
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