The Meeting That Shouldn't Have Been an Email (or a Meeting)
How we spend our working hours has changed beyond recognition. Whether we've actually got better at it is another question.
At some point in the last five years, someone decided that the ideal working day involves attending eight video calls, sending forty-three Slack messages, and at some point, somewhere in the middle of it, doing some actual work. Nobody voted for this. It just sort of happened.
At some point in the last five years, someone decided that the ideal working day involves attending eight video calls, sending forty-three Slack messages, and at some point, somewhere in the middle of it, doing some actual work. Nobody voted for this. It just sort of happened.
The shift to remote and hybrid working genuinely improved a lot of things. No commute on a wet Tuesday. Flexible school pickups. The ability to eat a proper lunch rather than a sad desk sandwich. These are not small wins. But something went sideways with the meetings. Without a physical office to anchor collaboration, everything became a call. Status updates that would have been a corridor nod turned into thirty-minute Zoom slots. Questions that would have been answered in passing now require a calendar invite.
Nobody voted for eight video calls a day. It just sort of happened.
Nobody voted for eight video calls a day. It just sort of happened.
What's particularly interesting is that most people know this. Ask anyone how their week went and 'too many meetings' comes up in the first three sentences. Yet the meetings keep multiplying. Part of this is visibility anxiety — in a remote world, you can't be seen to be working unless you're actively in a call with someone. Part of it is that the friction of scheduling has dropped so low that it no longer feels like a commitment to book something. It's two clicks. Of course people do it.
The companies that have figured this out tend to share a few habits. They have clear policies about what warrants a meeting and what doesn't. They write things down more than they talk about them — asynchronous communication gets a genuine investment, not just a passing mention in a company values document. And they protect blocks of uninterrupted time with an almost religious fervour, because they've noticed that the deep work, the
The companies that have figured this out tend to share a few habits. They have clear policies about what warrants a meeting and what doesn't. They write things down more than they talk about them — asynchronous communication gets a genuine investment, not just a passing mention in a company values document. And they protect blocks of uninterrupted time with an almost religious fervour, because they've noticed that the deep work, the
thinking that actually moves things forward, requires a sustained stretch of quiet that a meeting-heavy diary simply doesn't allow.
None of this is revolutionary. Researchers who study productivity have been saying versions of it for years. The hard part isn't knowing it. It's doing it when every piece of collaboration software in existence is optimised to make booking another call feel like the natural next step.
A useful test, borrowed from teams who've got this right: before scheduling anything, ask whether the outcome could be achieved with a well-written message instead. Not a wall of text — a clear, specific message with context and a question. More often than not, the answer comes back faster than the meeting would have started. Worth a try, next time you reach for the calendar.
None of this is revolutionary. Researchers who study productivity have been saying versions of it for years. The hard part isn't knowing it. It's doing it when every piece of collaboration software in existence is optimised to make booking another call feel like the natural next step.
A useful test, borrowed from teams who've got this right: before scheduling anything, ask whether the outcome could be achieved with a well-written message instead. Not a wall of text — a clear, specific message with context and a question. More often than not, the answer comes back faster than the meeting would have started. Worth a try, next time you reach for the calendar.
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