Meetings are not work, says Southwest Airlines CEO, and he will cut commitments

Business leaders are sounding the alarm: meetings have taken over everyday life, and real work is taking a backseat. And Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan is the latest to speak out on the phenomenon — arguing that many leaders confuse constant meetings with leadership.

“When you first start out, it’s easy to confuse being busy and going to meetings with leadership,” Jordan said last week on a panel of CEOs at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit. “What we’ve all realized, I’m sure, is that there’s no time left for ‘work,’ and you confuse going to meetings with work.”

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Over the years, Jordan’s solution has become increasingly straightforward: protect your own time. For 2026, your goal is to keep your calendar completely clear every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoon — blocking any attempts to schedule meetings at those times.

While acknowledging that this approach may seem “crazy” to some executives, he said CEOs are hired to do a job that only they can do — and that rarely happens when they are stuck in back-to-back meetings.

“It’s so you can work on the things you need to work on. Think about what’s important right now. Call the people you need to talk to,” Jordan added.

The strategy may be paying off. Despite a turbulent year for the airline industry, Southwest reported an unexpected profit in its most recent quarterly report. Year to date, the company’s share price has risen around 23%.

Fortune reached out to Southwest Airlines for additional comment.

Meetings have become the bane of employees and employers

Jordan is not alone in his frustration. Meetings have become a shared pain point for workers and executives.

During the pandemic, meetings almost took on an emotional support role — an attempt to replace face-to-face interaction amid lockdowns. Without the need to wait for an available conference room, schedules filled up quickly.

But now nearly 80% of people say they’re drowning in so many meetings and calls that they barely have time to get any real work done, according to a 2024 study by Atlassian, which surveyed 5,000 workers across four continents. About 72% of the time, meetings are considered ineffective.

This reaction has led a growing number of executives to aggressively prune—or even eliminate—meetings from their corporate calendars altogether, sometimes creating entire days without meetings.

Still, some experts warn that completely eliminating meetings can be a risky strategy, capable of eliminating the sense of belonging to the organization and generating opposite effects in the long term.

“Meetings don’t need to be banned completely. Just the ineffective ones and the ones that waste time,” Ben Thompson, CEO and co-founder of Employment Hero, previously told Fortune.

How Nvidia and JPMorgan Chase Handle Meeting Overload

Other CEOs have taken unconventional approaches.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, for example, does not hold one-on-one meetings with his more than 50 direct reports.

Doing so, he said, would not only overload his schedule, but also reduce the team’s ability as a whole to face challenges, work effectively and maintain transparency.

“Our company was designed for agility — for information to flow as quickly as possible. For people to be empowered by what they can do, not by what they know,” Huang said at Stanford University last year.

At JPMorgan Chase, CEO Jamie Dimon has taken a more direct approach. In his annual letter to shareholders, released last spring, he encouraged employees to rethink whether meetings are really worth it.

“Here’s another example of what slows us down: meetings. Stop meetings,” he wrote. “But when they happen, they need to start at the right time and end at the right time—and someone has to lead them. There should also be a purpose for each meeting and always an action list.”

Efficiency became an even greater priority as JPMorgan required employees to return to the office five days a week. Meetings, Dimon emphasized, should receive full attention.

“No napping, no reading emails,” reinforced Dimon at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit event in October. “If you have an iPad in front of me and it looks like you’re reading email or receiving notifications, I’ll tell you to close that damn thing. It’s disrespectful.”