For many white-collar professionals, meetings have become a constant annoyance: they often drag on, interrupt focused work, and rarely require everyone's participation. In response, business leaders are protecting their time by setting boundaries around when they join the conversation. Dropbox co-CEO Ashraf Alkarmi follows a simple rule to decide which calls make the cut.

"I pick things that I can make significant progress on in that quarter," Alkarmi said in a recent interview with Business Insider. "And so it becomes a filter for how I prioritize my time."

To pick and choose which meetings to attend, Alkarmi sets five goals he needs to achieve every quarter at the $7.3 billion cloud storage company, where he shares the top job with cofounder Drew Houston. He uses these important target areas—like people, business, and performance—to shape his weekly schedule and decide where to focus his efforts.

To make sure everyone is on the same page, the Dropbox co-CEO shares his key priorities with his circle, chief of staff, and administrative team. When a lot falls on his plate, these objectives "win at all times," he explained.

During the first quarter, for example, Alkarmi combed through data and worked toward solutions to reduce customer churn, a closely watched metric for subscription software businesses that depend on customers renewing over time. Making "meaningful progress" and moving that needle became one of his main priorities on Dropbox's business side. To keep all his ducks in a row, the leader uses the daily task-tracking app Trello to stay on track with his quarterly goals. Sticking to his list of five also narrows down which conversations are worth a chunk of time in his busy schedule.

"Sometimes I get meetings that are not related to these things, and I don't go," Alkarmi continued.

Alkarmi's intentionality also clarifies when his priorities require his direct involvement, and when he can step back and rely on his team.

"At Dropbox, our mission is to design a more enlightened way of working, and to me, part of that is being intentional about where I spend my time," Alkarmi said in a statement to Fortune. "Clear priorities help me focus on where I can have the greatest impact. Just as importantly, they help me know when I need to be in the room and when I can trust my team to keep things moving."

CEOs have their own meeting rules: call-free afternoons, fewer one-on-ones, and later start times

Like Alkarmi, other CEOs are protecting their calendars from unnecessary meetings and treating uninterrupted focus time as a resource worth guarding. The concern has even shaped corporate policy: Microsoft's annual Work Trend Index research has repeatedly identified meetings as a leading disruptor of focused work, and Shopify in 2023 canceled its recurring meetings of three or more people and added no-meeting Wednesdays.

Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan has called out the fact that meetings are crowding out the actual work that really needs to get done. For that reason, he set a 2026 goal to keep his calendar completely clear every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoon, blocking anyone from booking calls during those hours.

Jordan acknowledged that approach might sound "crazy" to some executives, but he reasoned that CEOs are hired to do work only they can do—and that rarely happens if they're trapped in back-to-back meetings.

"When you first start, it's easy to confuse busyness and going to meetings with leadership," Jordan said on a panel of CEOs at the New York Times DealBook Summit last year. "Because what we all find, I'm sure, is there's no time to 'work,' and you confuse going to meetings with the work."

Similarly, Jensen Huang, the cofounder and CEO of the $5.3 trillion technology giant Nvidia, has trimmed the fat from his work routine by prioritizing efficiency over regular check-ins. The chips leader doesn't believe that frequent catch-ups with his 55 direct reports are the best use of his time, given that a continuous stream of meetings would only clog up his work schedule and slow him down. Instead, he frees up space for broader, team-wide collaboration—which Huang said also helps maintain transparency within one of the world's largest companies.

"I don't do one-on-ones with any of them, unless they need me; then I'll drop everything for them," Huang said at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research summit in 2024. "They never hear me say something to them that is only for them to know. There's not one piece of information that I somehow secretly tell the staff; I don't tell the rest of the company."

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has established his own rules around the flow of his day. He believes that no leader should apologize for how they choose to run their businesses—and he's unabashedly following his own advice. Even though many leaders operate on a rise-and-grind mindset, Chesky hits his creative stride later into the night. For that reason, he's set boundaries around when he takes meetings, barring any calls before 10 a.m.

"When you're CEO," Chesky told The Wall Street Journal last year, "you can decide when the first meeting of the day is."

Across the four leaders' systems, the common thread is treating the calendar as something to be actively managed rather than passively filled.