You sat through a 45-minute meeting yesterday. The agenda: "Update on Project X." The output: a shared understanding that Project X exists and is ongoing.
That's it. That's what 45 minutes bought the team.
This is the meeting that should have been an email.
The Test
Before scheduling any meeting, ask yourself:
Can this be a document instead?
If the purpose is to share information, inform a decision, or align people on status — that's a doc. Not a meeting.
The meeting tax is real. When you call a meeting, you're not just charging your time. You're charging everyone else's. Five people in a 45-minute meeting is 3.75 hours of company time. That's nearly half a person-day.
What Email Does Better
Email (or a shared doc) beats meetings for:
- Status updates: Read it when you're ready, at your own pace
- Decision context: People can review data and think before responding
- Wide distribution: No one was left out because they were in another meeting
- Documentation: It's searchable. Meetings aren't.
When Meetings Are Actually Better
Meetings are good for:
- High-emotion topics: Layoffs, performance issues, sensitive feedback
- Real-time collaboration: Whiteboarding sessions, debugging together
- Commitment-building: Getting everyone in a room to make a hard decision quickly
- Relationship-building: Checking in, team bonding, 1:1s
Notice what's missing: status updates, project reviews, information sharing, "let everyone know what's happening."
How to Cancel Your Next Meeting
Try this: Send the update as an email instead. Say: "I'm going to try handling this via email instead of a meeting. If you need more discussion, we can schedule something targeted."
Most of the time, email works fine. And when it doesn't, you've just had a 15-minute targeted discussion instead of a 45-minute status review.
Your calendar — and your team — will thank you.
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