Over the years, Jordan’s solution has been increasingly straightforward: protect his time. For 2026, his goal is to keep his calendar completely clear every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoon—blocking anyone from booking meetings during those hours.
While he acknowledges that approach might sound “crazy” to some executives, he said CEOs are hired to do work only they can do—and that rarely happens when they are trapped in back-to-back meetings.
“It’s so that 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,” Jordan added.
Other CEOs have adopted their own unconventional approaches.
“Our company was designed for agility—for information to flow as quickly as possible. For people to be empowered by what they are able to do, not what they know,” Huang said at Stanford University last year.
“Here’s another example of what slows us down: meetings. Kill meetings,” he wrote. “But when they do happen, they have to start on time and end on time – and someone’s got to lead them. There should also be a purpose to every meeting and always a follow-up list.”
