In recent years, Shopify canceled all recurring meetings with more than two people to free up employees to work on other tasks. on BlockCEO Jack Dorsey declared Tuesday without a company-wide meeting to shift the balance from “talking about work” to actually doing it. Instagram Head Adam Mosseri promised to cancel all recurring meetings every six monthsadd only those that are “absolutely necessary.” on Southwest Airlines, CEO Bob Jordan made a public declaration that the meetings would not work. He blocked some of his own afternoons from meetings. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, meanwhile, encouraged employees to “kill meetings” in his 2024 letter to shareholders.

Such actions may seem like an overzealous crusade against a basic — if hated — part of the modern workplace, but Rebecca Hinds, author of the new book. Your Best Meeting Eversays these bosses may not go far enough. The Stanford PhD, who has studied meetings for 15 years and advises almost 100 companies, says that organizations can benefit from what he calls “Armeetingeddon” or a “Meeting Doomsday”—completely destroying meetings and starting from scratch.

According to his research, 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.

“As knowledge workers, we spend 85 to 90% of our time collaborating,” he says. “There is no activity in which we spend more time than meetings, and yet they are extremely ineffective.” Meetings have a star role in the “productivity theater” in workplaces because they are very visible, he added: “There is nothing that says you are more important than being double- or triple-booked for a meeting, so we are oriented to show productivity through meetings, as opposed to actually designing the meeting to keep things going. In organizations where the collective mission and individual goals are not clearly, the meetings have become a kind of status symbol—”a way to show progress, show productivity,” Hinds said, calling that tendency “pernicious.”

Hinds’ solution is to treat meetings as “the most important, most expensive, and most overlooked products of your entire organization,” he writes in his book. Armetingeddon or cleaning the calendar is a good place to start. Hinds’ former employer Dropbox famously pulled it off in 2013 when, “in one move,” Hinds writes, the IT department “wiped recurring meetings from employees’ calendars overnight.” For weeks, only a few important meetings were spared from the company’s “meeting moratorium.”

“The relentless drumbeat of meetings disappeared overnight, leaving behind something unfamiliar: uninterrupted time for employees to do their work,” wrote Hinds, who joined Dropbox the following year. In the “meeting Doomsdays” that Hinds led, participants recovered up to 11 hours per week — gains with staying power, he writes.

But wiping the calendars clean is only the first step. Hinds recommends rebuilding after a 48-hour “meeting detox,” and then adding back meetings that have real impact and are well-designed.

Among his top tips for such meetings is to take the default duration of the meeting — 30 minutes or an hour — and cut it in half, creating a sense of urgency and the need for attendees to prepare. The same rule can be applied to the invitation list. In fact, research by Bain & Company found that when a meeting includes more than seven people, the quality of the decision decreases by 10% per additional body.

However, meetings have a way of returning to calendars, so leaders should empower their employees to defend their time and refuse meetings, which may feel bad or even insulting to the organizer. Companies like Dropbox and GitLab give employees pre-written scripts to politely decline, along the lines of: “Thanks for joining me! I wonder if we can try to work this out via email?”

Hinds isn’t surprised that many CEOs are focusing on meetings today: “We live in this era of efficiency,” he says. And when workers have fewer meetings, productivity often increases. Cooperation also increases “because 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 monitoring tools for their team.”

Not necessarily from the top: This is a good opportunity for the average employee to also prevent meetings, because they face pressure to develop the skills that best use AI. “We know a lot of that is done through personal experimentation and personal time,” Hinds said. “We owe it to ourselves to think about pockets of time that we can give back (and spend) on things that will truly advance our own careers and improve our organization’s ability to execute.”

That said, there is one innovation in meeting technology that Hinds is not a fan of: AI notetakers. He never used it himself. The temptation to send a bot to a meeting, he says, “is a sign to me that the meeting was not purposefully designed.”