Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi Keeps His Calendar Empty to Find the '10x' Fix

Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi runs one of Silicon Valley's most valuable software companies — a business valued at $190 billion — and his core scheduling rule is to put nothing on his calendar.

"I try to compress the calendar," Ghodsi said on a recent episode of the Long Strange Trip podcast. "What I mean by that is I try to put nothing on the calendar. It ends up being packed anyway, but there are many blocks that are free where I can go back to this main thing."

That "main thing" gets defined three mornings a week. At 8 a.m. every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Ghodsi and his team meet to identify the biggest bottleneck facing the company and how to solve it together.

"I want to unblock that big thing that I think is the thing that's going to get us 10x," he said.

Beyond those sessions, Ghodsi resists letting other meetings land on his schedule. A day of back-to-back appointments is not just exhausting. In his view, it means losing control of his own time.

"I think if I do the 8 a.m. back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-5 or 6 p.m., I consider those days I've just been a slave to my calendar. I'm just working for my calendar," Ghodsi said. Instead of advancing his own priorities, he spends such days servicing everyone else's demands: "Monkeys on my back, right?"

Fortune reached out to Databricks for further comment.

A wider CEO rebellion against the meeting glut

Ghodsi's calendar discipline reflects a broader pushback among chief executives against meetings that waste time. The evidence that the problem is real is substantial. A 2024 survey by software giant Atlassian found that nearly three out of four meetings are ineffective at disseminating information. For 77% of respondents, meetings simply create more meetings.

Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan warned last year that leaders can easily mistake being busy for being effective.

"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 in December 2025. "…Because what we all find, I'm sure, is there's no time to 'work,' and you confuse going to meetings with the work."

United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby has taken a more concrete approach. He caps his meetings at four hours a day and sets strict rules for when a meeting is convened in the first place.

"My meetings are also quick, and my meetings are almost all conversational," Kirby said in a recent interview with Semafor. "I want to talk—really, don't go through decks. If you want to send a deck, send it to me in advance, and then we're just going to talk about it. But you're not going to read slides to me."

Few CEOs have been blunter than JPMorgan Chase chief Jamie Dimon, who put his philosophy in two words in his 2024 letter to shareholders: "Kill meetings."

Dimon does not consider every meeting useless. He expects them to be treated with the same focus as any other important work.

"When I go to a meeting, I've done the pre-reads, and you get 100% of my attention," Dimon said at Fortune's 2025 Most Powerful Women summit.

"None of this nodding off, none of this reading my mail," Dimon added. "If you have an iPad in front of me and it looks like you're reading your email or getting notifications, I tell you to close the damn thing. It's disrespectful."

The pattern spans a 27-year-old airline incumbent, a 160-year-old bank, and a fast-growing data platform. As Databricks continues to scale from its $190 billion valuation, Ghodsi's bet is that the companies that grow fastest will be the ones whose leaders protect large blocks of unscheduled time to attack the single bottleneck that matters most.