We’ve all been there. You’re sitting in a conference room, or more likely these days, staring at a grid of faces on Zoom, wondering why you’re actually there. Someone is reading off a slide deck that was already shared in the calendar invite. Your Slack notifications are pinging in the background. You have a deadline in two hours. You realize, with a heavy sink in your chest, that this meeting could be an email. It’s not just a meme anymore; it’s a symptom of a deeper rot in how we handle our professional time.
Honestly, the phrase has become a sort of battle cry for the overworked. It’s the shorthand for "you are stealing my focus."
Research from Steven Rogelberg, a professor at the University of North Carolina and author of The Surprising Science of Meetings, suggests that poorly managed meetings don't just waste time—they actively drain employee engagement. When we talk about meetings that should have been emails, we’re talking about "asynchronous" information being forced into a "synchronous" format. It’s a mismatch of medium and message.
If you're just broadcasting information, you don't need a live audience. You need a Send button.
The Psychology of Why We Keep Meeting Anyway
So, if everyone hates it, why does it keep happening?
It’s complicated. For some managers, meetings are a security blanket. If I can see my team’s faces, I know they’re working, right? It’s a legacy of industrial-era thinking. We call it "presence bias." There’s also the "MOM effect"—Minimize Omission Mistakes. People invite everyone to the meeting because they’re terrified of leaving someone out and causing a political stir. So, instead of three decision-makers, you get fifteen spectators.
The cost is staggering. A Shopify calculator once went viral for showing exactly how much a meeting costs based on the salaries of the people in the room. A simple 30-minute sync with six mid-level managers can easily cost a company $500 to $1,000 in raw labor. Multiply that by every department, every week.
We’re literally burning money to watch someone struggle with their "Mute" button.
When Status Updates Kill Creativity
Status meetings are the worst offenders.
If the goal is to say, "I finished task A and I’m starting task B," that is a database entry. It is a Slack message. It is a Trello card. When you force a group of adults to sit in a circle and recite their "to-do" lists, you aren't collaborating. You're performing.
This performance comes at the expense of "Deep Work," a concept popularized by Cal Newport. It takes about 23 minutes to fully regain focus after a distraction. A 15-minute "quick sync" isn't 15 minutes. It’s closer to an hour of lost cognitive momentum. You’ve fragmented your day into tiny, unusable slivers of time.
Spotting the Signs: This Meeting Could Be An Email
How do you actually know?
It’s pretty simple. Ask yourself: Is this a monologue or a dialogue? If the person speaking is doing 90% of the talking and the rest are just nodding or checking their phones, it’s an email. If the goal is purely "FYI," it’s an email. If there is no specific decision that needs to be made by the end of the 30 minutes, it is definitely an email.
- The "FYI" Trap: If you are just sharing updates, use a shared doc.
- The Feedback Loop: If you need a simple "yes" or "no" on a design or a sentence, don't huddle. Comment on the file.
- The Social Crutch: Sometimes people schedule meetings because they’re lonely. It sounds harsh, but it's true. Remote work is isolating, and a "check-in" feels like human contact. But there are better ways to build culture than forcing people into unproductive status calls.
On the flip side, some things should be meetings.
Hard conversations. Performance reviews. Brainstorming where ideas need to bounce off one another at high speed. Conflict resolution. If you’ve been back-and-forth on a thread for three days and nobody knows what’s going on, for the love of God, get on a call.
The "No Agenda, No Attenda" Rule
This is a real thing used at companies like Amazon and Google. If a meeting invite arrives without a clear agenda or a goal, you have permission to decline it. It sounds radical. It feels rude. But it’s the only way to protect your output.
Amazon’s "Two Pizza Rule"—never having a meeting where two pizzas couldn't feed the whole group—is famous for a reason. Smaller groups are more efficient.
But we can go further.
Try the "Silent Meeting" technique. Square and Twitter have experimented with this. You start the meeting with 10 minutes of total silence where everyone reads a shared memo and adds comments. Then, you only talk about the points of contention. It’s weird at first. It’s also incredibly fast. You realize that 80% of the stuff you were going to talk about was already understood through the reading.
Real-World Examples of Meeting Purges
In 2023, Shopify deleted 12,000 recurring meetings from its employees' calendars. They called it "Chaos Monkey." They basically wiped the slate clean and told people not to add anything back for two weeks.
👉 See also: Are All Big Lots Closing? What’s Actually Happening to the Discount Giant
The result? People realized they didn't miss most of those calls.
Asana also does "No Meeting Wednesdays." It gives the brain a chance to stay in a flow state. When you know you have a guaranteed eight-hour block without an interruption, your anxiety levels actually drop. You stop rushing. You start thinking.
How to Pivot Without Being a Jerk
You can't just send a snarky meme of this meeting could be an email to your boss. Well, you can, but you might not have a job on Monday.
Instead, try the "Positive Pivot."
When you get an invite that looks like a time-sink, reply with: "Hey, I’m deep in [Project X] right now. To save everyone time, can I just send my updates over email/Slack instead? If there’s a specific decision you need me for, let me know and I’ll jump in for that part."
You’re being helpful. You’re being efficient. You’re showing that you value the company’s time as much as your own.
Actionable Next Steps to Save Your Calendar
To stop the cycle of useless meetings, you need a system, not just a complaint.
- Audit your recurring invites. Look at every meeting that happens every week. Ask the organizer: "What is the specific goal of this?" If they can't answer, suggest moving it to a bi-weekly cadence or a written update.
- Default to 15 or 25 minutes. Outlook and Google Calendar default to 30 or 60 minutes. This is a trap. Parkinson’s Law says that work expands to fill the time available. If you give a meeting 60 minutes, it will take 60 minutes.
- The "Optional" Empowerment. If you’re the organizer, mark people as optional. Tell them: "I’m putting you on here so you’re in the loop, but feel free to skip if you’re busy."
- Send the "Pre-Read" early. If you’re presenting, send the deck 24 hours in advance. Start the meeting by saying, "I’ll assume everyone read the doc, so let’s dive straight into the questions on page four."
- Declare Meeting Bankruptcy. If your calendar is a solid wall of purple blocks, delete the recurring ones that haven't felt useful in a month. See who screams. If nobody notices, you just bought yourself five hours a week.
The goal isn't to never talk to your coworkers again. The goal is to make sure that when we do talk, it actually matters. Every time you hit "send" on an invite, you are asking for the most valuable thing your colleagues have: their attention.
Treat it like the expensive resource it is. Stop meeting. Start doing.