Instagram chief Adam Mosseri recently ordered staff back to the office 5 days a week starting in February 2026. While it was the return-to-office order that turned heads, Mosseri’s memo included another key directive: Have fewer meetings.
“We all spend too much time in meetings that are not effective, and it’s slowing us down,” Mosseri wrote.
He said employees should have biweekly 1-on-1 meetings and decline meetings that fall during their “focus blocks.” Every six months, staff should cancel all recurring meetings and “only re-add the ones that are absolutely necessary,” he added.
Experts who spoke with CNBC Make It said it’s broadly a good approach and shared tips for managing your meetings and deep work.
Meeting overload
“Meetings aren’t inherently the enemy,” says Steven Rogelberg, Chancellor’s Professor at UNC Charlotte teaching organizational science, management and psychology and an author of two books on meeting science. Done well, meetings can have benefits like better coordination, employee engagement and decision-making, he notes. “The problem is wasted time in meetings and bad meetings.”
Bad meetings are often ineffective, unnecessary, bloated in time or size, or dominated by the organizer, Rogelberg says. And even successful meetings have a limit; many people in knowledge work professions have experienced meeting overload before.
“There are things we are trying to accomplish, and meetings are a tool to make that happen,” says Laura Vanderkam, author of several books on time management and productivity. But for most people, “meetings are not the work itself.”
Managing your ‘meeting diet’
For many employers, “more localized approaches to meeting diets is much more helpful to the organization than a top-down approach,” says Rogelberg.
His solution? “Don’t laugh at me,” he prefaces. “We actually need to start having a meeting about meetings.”
By that he means leaders should meet with their teams to scrutinize their recurring meetings and talk about how to improve them.
“You’re going to show up at a meeting regardless of how you feel,” says Vanderkam. “You are not going to solve that difficult business problem at 3:30 p.m. when you want to take a nap.”
Besides Instagram, other companies have also targeted meeting overload. Shopify announced a “calendar purge” in 2023. Kaz Nejatian, then vice president of product and COO of Shopify, wrote shortly after that the move was on track to free up 322,000 hours over the course of a year and that employees were “on track to deliver about 25% more projects because of it.”
Companies like Pinterest, Atlassian and Asana have tried “no-meeting days” when staff can go heads down on their work. After roughly 100 days of no-meeting days each Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday for individual contributors on its product engineering team, Pinterest found that 91.9% reported being more productive since adopting the schedule.
But meeting bloat remains pervasive. Each meeting on your calendar should have a purpose, and you should be necessary to it to be invited.
“Any time a meeting doesn’t have to justify its place on your calendar, there’s a reasonable chance it couldn’t,” Vanderkam says. “There is really no reason to be just marching from meeting to meeting like you’re a middle schooler changing classes.”
Making time for deep work
Mosseri also wants employees “declining meetings if they fall during your focus blocks.”
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., peak productivity periods for many people that are instead wasted on calls.
Having too many meetings can mean “you no longer have sufficiently long uninterrupted blocks to actually make progress on the things you’re talking about in the meetings,” says Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown University and author of several books on focus and productivity.
Newport recommends time blocking your work week, including blocking out deep work on your calendar like a meeting.
“It’s a tier one activity,” he says. “It’s not a nice-to-have, it’s your main job.”
Perhaps most importantly, it should be undisturbed. The June Microsoft report found that employees using Microsoft 365 are interrupted every 2 minutes by a meeting, email or notification. But the brain takes time to enter a focused state for deep work and can easily lose that concentration.
“Checking those channels immediately scrambles the brain,” Newport says.
During deep work, turn off your notifications and minimize other distractions. Your colleagues might feel better knowing they can still reach you, for emergencies only, by phone.
Aim for at least 60 to 90 minutes of deep work at a time. Most people’s brains are better at it in the mornings, though part of that is because as you run into more requests, meetings, and tasks throughout the day, “you have a much more crowded brain at 4 p.m. than at 8 a.m.,” Newport says.
There are inevitably times you’ll stray from your planned time blocks. In those cases, just “make a plan for the time that remains,” Newport says.
Want to give your kids the ultimate advantage? Sign up for CNBC’s new online course, How to Raise Financially Smart Kids. Learn how to build healthy financial habits today to set your children up for greater success in the future. Use coupon code EARLYBIRD for 30% off. Offer valid from Dec. 8 to Dec. 22, 2025. Terms apply.
