No worker, from front-line employee to CEO, is immune to the end-of-week brain fog that comes after a string of intense days on the job. Over the course of his Wall Street career, JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon has learned to avoid making big decisions when the weekend rolls around—fried nerves will only lead to poor choices.
“I’ve learned some stuff like when I was 30, like anger doesn’t help,” the bank CEO recently said during an interview with NPR. “Making big decisions on a Friday when you’re tired is a really bad idea.”
Dimon has spent more than four decades in finance—from working as an assistant to then-American Express president Sandy Weill, to leading $826 billion titan JPMorgan through the financial crisis.
Despite having learned what works best in business, Dimon admitted he still falls into the Friday decision-making trap; and every time he comes out of it remembering why he avoids making important choices during his end-of-week slump.
“I always call them lessons learned and relearned,” Dimon continued. “I still make some of those mistakes, unfortunately.”
The CEOs who set rules to keep them ‘sane’ on the job
There are many business leaders who set firm boundaries around their schedules and meetings—habits honed over decades of experience finding their flow.
Airbnb cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky is doing things differently in leading the $78 billion short-term rental giant. He no longer bothers with tedious emailing, rarely dealing with his inbox anymore; instead, Chesky prefers to call, text, or talk it out when he’s on the clock. The leader also banned 9 a.m. meetings, pushing back all those important conversations to 10 a.m. the earliest. “When you’re CEO,” told The Wall Street Journal last year, “you can decide when the first meeting of the day is.
“Don’t apologize for how you want to run your company,” Chesky continued, adding that “[Emailing] was the thing about my job that I hated the most before the pandemic.”
Curbing time-consuming, energy-draining meetings is also a priority of Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan in 2026. The airline executive said that “it’s easy to confuse busyness and going to meetings with leadership,” but this year he’s shaking things up. Jordan said his goal is to keep his calendar free of any meetings every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoon. It could sound “crazy” to some leaders, he acknowledged, but it allows him to invest more energy into other matters.
“It’s so that you can work on things you need to work on,” Jordan said at the New York Times DealBook Summit last year. “You can think about what’s important right now. You can call people you need to talk to.”
Marc Randolph, the cofounder of Netflix, also set one rule when it came to managing his intense entrepreneurial career: Tuesdays ended at 5 p.m., no matter what. For decades, Randolph said he tried to keep “my life balanced with my job” by drawing that line. And it proved to be essential to his well-being.
“For over 30 years, I had a hard cutoff on Tuesdays. Rain or shine, I left at exactly 5 p.m. and spent the evening with my best friend,” Randolph wrote in a 2023 LinkedIn post. “We would go to a movie, have dinner, or just go window-shopping downtown together.”
“Those Tuesday nights kept me sane,” the Netflix cofounder continued. “And they put the rest of my work in perspective.”
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