The Meeting That Could Have Been an Email

Personal · 2026-08-20

The Meeting That Could Have Been an Email (And Other Lies We Tell Ourselves)

Right, so everyone says this. Everyone's had that meeting, nodded along, made the joke afterwards in the corridor, and then gone straight back into the diary and booked another one exactly like it. Which is the bit that actually interests me. Not the meeting. The bit where we know, we absolutely know, and we do it anyway.

I think we've got the whole thing backwards, actually. We treat "this meeting could've been an email" like an insight, like something clever we've noticed, when really it's just a description of the symptom. Nobody's asking the actual question, which is: why do we keep scheduling things we already suspect are pointless before they've even started?

Here's my theory, and I'll admit it's not a comfortable one. Meetings aren't really about information. They're about visibility. You call a meeting so people can see you doing something. So you can be seen deciding, seen contributing, seen present. The email version doesn't give you that. An email is just words on a screen that someone reads in their own time, maybe skims, maybe ignores entirely, and you'll never know if it landed. A meeting gives you a room. It gives you a moment where your existence in the org chart is confirmed by other people's attendance.

Which sounds a bit bleak when I write it out like that. But I don't think it's cynical, I think it's just true.

Think about the last meeting you sat in that genuinely needed to happen. Not the ones where someone read out a status update everyone could've read themselves. The real ones, where a decision got made because three people in a room disagreed and worked it out in real time, where the tension actually did something. Those exist. They're just rare, and they're rare because most meetings aren't built for disagreement, they're built for confirmation of things already decided somewhere else, in a smaller room, with fewer people, probably over Slack.

So the meeting becomes theatre. A performance of consensus. Everyone nods, someone summarises what was just said as if it needed summarising, and you leave having spent forty minutes agreeing with something you'd already agreed with by 9am.

I used to think the fix was efficiency. Shorter meetings. Standing meetings. No-laptop meetings. Fifteen-minute stand-ups where everyone stays fidgety and uncomfortable on purpose, apparently, because comfort breeds rambling. I've sat through all of these formats and I can tell you, with total confidence, that the format was never the problem. You can make a pointless meeting fifteen minutes long and it's still pointless, just faster. Efficiency doesn't fix purpose. It just compresses the waste.

The actual fix, I think, is much less exciting than a new meeting format. It's just asking, before you send the invite, what decision needs making that can't be made without these specific people in this specific room right now. That's it. That's the whole test. And most of the time the honest answer is "none", which is uncomfortable, because then you have to admit the meeting was for something else. Visibility. Habit. The comfort of a full calendar that makes you feel busy rather than useful.

There's a particular kind of manager, and you'll know the type, who measures their own value by how full their diary is. Back to back, no gaps, proof of importance stacked in thirty-minute blocks. I get the appeal. An empty calendar can feel like an accusation. Like you've been found out, like there's nothing anyone needs from you today. So the meetings fill in the silence. They're less about work and more about not having to sit with the discomfort of an open afternoon.

Which brings me to the email thing again, because I think the joke's actually pointing somewhere real and we just don't follow it through. If a meeting could've been an email, what it's really telling you is that the meeting wasn't about the content at all. The content was incidental. The meeting was about the gathering. And there's nothing wrong with wanting to gather, people are social, teams need contact, I'm not saying abolish human interaction and communicate entirely through documents like some kind of admin monk. I'm saying be honest about which one you're doing. Call the social meeting a social meeting. Call the decision meeting a decision meeting. Stop dressing the first one up as the second because it feels more productive on a Tuesday.

Anyway. Next time you're about to send the invite, maybe just check. Is there an actual decision here, or are you just wanting to be seen making one? Honestly, either answer's fine. Just know which one you're picking before you block out everyone's afternoon.