According to CNBC, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri recently mandated a return to the office five days a week starting in February 2026. But the real headline was his directive to drastically cut meetings, calling them ineffective and a drag on speed. He instructed employees to have biweekly 1-on-1s, decline meetings during “focus blocks,” and, every six months, cancel all recurring meetings and only re-add essential ones. Productivity experts endorsed the approach, noting companies like Shopify freed up 322,000 hours with a “calendar purge,” and Pinterest found over 91% of engineers were more productive after instituting no-meeting days. A Microsoft report also found half of all meetings clog the peak productivity windows of 9-11 AM and 1-3 PM.
The real problem isn’t meetings. It’s bad meetings.
Here’s the thing: nobody’s saying all meetings are evil. Steven Rogelberg, a professor who literally studies “meeting science,” points out they’re crucial for coordination and decision-making. The enemy is the bad meeting—the unnecessary one, the bloated one, the one where you’re just a spectator. As author Laura Vanderkam puts it, “meetings are not the work itself.” They’re a tool to *enable* the work. But when your calendar is a solid block of back-to-back Zooms, you’re not doing the actual thinking, creating, or problem-solving. You’re just… changing classes, like a middle schooler. So what’s the fix? Rogelberg has a deceptively simple idea: have a meeting about meetings. Seriously. Teams need to scrutinize their recurring invites and ask the hard question: does this still need to exist?
Defending your brain’s peak hours
Mosseri’s rule about declining meetings during “focus blocks” is the key tactical move. That Microsoft data is brutal—our best hours are being hijacked by default. Cal Newport, the deep work guru, argues this creates a vicious cycle: you meet to discuss work you never have time to do. His solution is time-blocking. Treat deep work like a tier-one meeting with yourself. Put it on the calendar, defend it fiercely, and make it undisturbed. Because our brains aren’t light switches. It takes time to get into a flow state, and a single notification can scramble it. Aim for 60-90 minute blocks, preferably in the morning. Why? As Newport says, you have a much more crowded brain at 4 p.m. than at 8 a.m. It’s not just willpower; it’s cognitive load.
Can a top-down order actually fix meeting culture?
Now, there’s an interesting tension here. Mosseri’s edict is top-down, but experts like Rogelberg think “more localized approaches” are better. A company-wide purge can work, as Shopify and Pinterest show. Pinterest’s engineering experiment with no-meeting days Tuesday through Thursday is a great case study. But sustaining it requires everyone, especially leaders, to buy in. If the boss still schedules impromptu calls during your focus block, the system fails. Vanderkam’s rule is golden: every meeting should have to justify its place on your calendar. If it can’t, it shouldn’t be there. The goal isn’t zero meetings. It’s *effective* meetings, leaving vast, protected stretches of time for the actual work. Seems simple, right? Then why is it so hard for every company to do?
