The Five-Goal Filter
Dropbox co-CEO Ashraf Alkarmi has a straightforward answer to calendar creep: five goals per quarter, and nothing else gets a slot on his schedule.
'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.'
Alkarmi sets those five target areas — spanning people, business, and performance — at the start of each quarter at the $7.3 billion cloud storage company. He shares the list with his chief of staff and administrative team so that the priorities 'win at all times' when competing demands pile up. The daily task-tracking app Trello keeps him accountable to the list throughout the week.
The rule has teeth. 'Sometimes I get meetings that are not related to these things, and I don't go,' Alkarmi said.
During the first quarter, one of those five priorities was reducing customer churn. Alkarmi combed through data and worked toward concrete solutions, treating 'meaningful progress' on that metric as a non-negotiable use of his time.
A Pattern Across the C-Suite
Alkarmi is not alone. Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan set a 2026 goal to keep his calendar completely clear every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoon. Jordan acknowledged the approach might sound 'crazy' to some executives, but he argued that CEOs are hired to do work only they can do — and that rarely happens inside 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 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.'
Nvidia cofounder and CEO Jensen Huang, who runs a $5.3 trillion technology company, takes a structural approach: he holds no regular one-on-ones with his 55 direct reports, freeing bandwidth for broader, team-wide collaboration. '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.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky draws the line at 10 a.m., barring any calls before that hour. 'When you're CEO,' Chesky told The Wall Street Journal last year, 'you can decide when the first meeting of the day is.'
The Productivity Principle
What these executives are really protecting is not comfort — it is output. Every hour spent in a meeting that does not advance a defined objective is an hour of compounding cost: a senior leader's time is among the most expensive inputs a company carries on its books, and the administrative state of corporate life has a well-documented tendency to multiply meetings far beyond their marginal value.
Alkarmi's five-goal framework is, at its core, a capital-allocation decision applied to time. Scarce resources — whether dollars or hours — produce the best returns when directed by clear priorities rather than by whoever last sent a calendar invite. The market rewards companies whose leaders think that way, and the $7.3 billion valuation Dropbox carries is a reasonable place to start measuring whether the discipline pays off.
