I’ve been in thousands of meetings over my career. Most of them could have been an email. Some of them could have been a Slack message. A disturbing number of them could have been absolutely nothing at all.
The modern workplace has a meeting addiction. Got a problem? Schedule a meeting. Need to make a decision? Meeting. Want to share an update that affects three people? Better book a room for twelve and block out an hour. It’s reflexive at this point, like reaching for your phone when you’re bored.
Here’s the thing: meetings are one of the most expensive ways to communicate. You’re taking multiple people, paying them their hourly rate, and forcing them all to be in the same place (physical or virtual) at the same time. For what? So someone can read bullet points off a slide while everyone else checks their email with their camera off?
Writing things down is almost always better than talking about them. When you write something, you have to think it through. You can’t waffle your way through a document the way you can waffle through a meeting. The act of writing forces clarity. It forces you to structure your thoughts, anticipate questions, and actually say something coherent.
Written communication also creates a record. How many times have you left a meeting and immediately forgotten half of what was discussed? Or worse, remembered it differently than the person sitting next to you? With written docs, there’s no ambiguity. The decision is there in black and white. You can reference it six months later when someone swears they never agreed to that timeline.
There’s another benefit that doesn’t get talked about enough: filtering. When someone sends me a document, I can skim it. I can read the summary, decide if the details matter to me, and move on with my life. In a meeting, I’m held hostage. I have to sit through the preamble, the context-setting, the tangents about someone’s weekend, all to get to the two minutes of information that actually affects my work.
This is why async communication works so well. People can engage with information when it suits them, at the depth that makes sense for their role. The CEO might read the executive summary. The engineer might dive into the technical appendix. Everyone gets what they need without wasting anyone’s time.
And speaking of time, let’s talk about flow states. Deep work requires uninterrupted blocks of concentration. You can’t solve hard problems in 25-minute chunks between meetings. Your brain needs time to load context, explore possibilities, and make connections. Every meeting is a context switch. Every context switch has a cost.
I’ve worked with people who have eight hours of meetings a day and then wonder why nothing gets done. When are they supposed to do their actual job? In the margins? At night? The calendar becomes a Tetris game of finding 30-minute gaps to squeeze in the work that supposedly justifies their salary.
Remote and distributed teams figured this out years ago. When your colleagues are spread across a dozen timezones, synchronous meetings become logistically painful. Someone’s always joining at midnight or missing dinner with their kids. So you learn to write things down. You learn to make decisions in documents and comment threads. You learn that most things can wait for a response.
At least, that’s the theory. In practice, a lot of companies went remote and brought their meeting addiction with them. They just swapped conference rooms for Zoom calls and carried on like nothing changed.
You know the type. They schedule daily standups, weekly syncs, fortnightly retrospectives, monthly all-hands, and quarterly planning sessions. They talk about how these meetings create synergy and belonging. They believe that seeing faces on a screen builds culture and keeps everyone aligned.
What they don’t see is that half the people on those calls are mentally checked out. They’re scrolling Twitter with the camera pointed at their forehead. They’re responding to Slack messages in another window. They’re nodding along and saying the right things when called upon, but they stopped paying attention fifteen minutes ago. Everyone plays the game. You unmute, you contribute something vaguely relevant, you laugh at the manager’s joke, then you go back to pretending to be engaged.
Here’s the thing about meetings: they have diminishing returns. One meeting every now and then actually means something. People show up prepared. They pay attention. They engage with the content because it’s a rare event. But when you have five meetings a day, every day, they all blur together. None of them feel important because none of them are special.
You’re diluting the usefulness of meetings by having too many of them. It’s like the company that sends ten emails a day and wonders why nobody reads them. At some point, people tune out. They develop meeting fatigue. They stop bringing their best thinking because what’s the point? There’ll be another meeting tomorrow to discuss the same things.
And here’s the real kicker: these same companies still expect people to ship. They fill calendars with hours of calls, then get frustrated when deadlines slip. They wonder why the engineers seem stressed, why projects take longer than estimated, why nobody has time for deep work anymore. The answer is staring at them from the calendar, but they refuse to see it.
This doesn’t mean meetings are never useful. There are times when you genuinely need real-time conversation. Brainstorming sessions where ideas build on each other. Difficult conversations where tone matters. Complex negotiations where you need to read the room. But these should be the exception, not the default.
The problem is that meetings feel productive. You’re in a room with other people, talking about work. Things are happening. Words are being said. It scratches the same itch as clearing your inbox or reorganising your desk. You feel busy. But feeling busy and being productive are not the same thing.
I’d argue that the best teams I’ve worked with treat meetings like a last resort. They write things down first. They try to resolve things asynchronously. And only when that fails, when there’s genuine disagreement or complexity that requires real-time dialogue, do they get everyone on a call.
The flexibility this creates is remarkable. People can structure their days around their energy levels and personal commitments. Early birds can crank through their hard problems at 6am. Night owls can do their best work after the kids are in bed. Nobody’s waiting around for a 3pm meeting that could have been a Notion doc.
If you’re a manager, try an experiment. Cancel all your recurring meetings for a month. Replace them with written updates. See what happens. My bet is that the important stuff still gets communicated, decisions still get made, and people are happier and more productive.
Your calendar shouldn’t look like a game of Tetris. Meetings should be rare enough that when you do have one, people actually pay attention.