Published on February 11, 2025 | By Patryk Ciechański
We've all felt it: the soul-crushing dread that accompanies a calendar notification for yet another meeting. While some meetings are essential hubs of collaboration, many are productivity black holes, sucking time and energy that could have been saved by a well-crafted email. To help you identify these time vampires, we present a taxonomy of common meetings that probably, definitely, absolutely could have been emails.
1. The Status Update Where Everyone Reads Their To-Do List
Description: A round-robin session where each attendee lists tasks they've completed, are working on, or plan to work on. Often involves awkward silences and the phrase "No updates from my end."
Why it's an email: Shared documents, project management tools, or a simple group email can convey this information asynchronously, allowing colleagues to digest it at their own pace (or ignore it entirely, as is tradition).
2. The Pre-Meeting Meeting
Description: A meeting scheduled to prepare for another, more important meeting. Often involves aligning on what to say, who should speak, and strategizing how to avoid actual work during the main meeting.
Why it's an email: A shared agenda document with assigned talking points or a brief preparatory email thread would suffice. This meeting is the corporate equivalent of putting socks on before your shoes – necessary, perhaps, but does it need its own scheduled event?
3. The Information Dump Meeting
Description: One person talks *at* the attendees for the entire duration, usually reading directly from slides filled with dense text. Attendee participation is limited to nodding politely or discreetly checking emails.
Why it's an email: Send the slides. Record a brief video walkthrough if necessary. Let people absorb the information when they have the mental bandwidth, not when they're trapped in a conference room contemplating the ceiling tiles.
4. The "Let's Brainstorm" Meeting with No Structure
Description: An open-ended session intended to generate ideas, but lacking a clear objective, facilitator, or method. Often devolves into tangents, awkward silences, or the loudest person dominating the conversation.
Why it's an email (initially): Start with an email outlining the problem and asking for initial ideas via a shared document or platform. This allows introverts and deep thinkers time to contribute. *Then*, if needed, schedule a focused meeting to discuss the generated ideas.
5. The Mandatory Fun Meeting
Description: Team-building activities disguised as meetings during work hours. While the intention might be good, forcing camaraderie rarely works and often feels like another obligation.
Why it's an email (or optional event): Make team-building optional and ideally outside of core work hours (with compensation or perks). An email invitation allows people to opt-in based on genuine interest, not forced participation.
Escaping the Meeting Madness?
If your calendar looks like a Tetris game gone wrong, filled with meetings that could easily be emails, maybe it's time to reclaim your time. Generate a resignation letter that hilariously captures your meeting fatigue with UnsubscribeCorp. It's the one communication that definitely shouldn't be a meeting.
The Bottom Line
Before scheduling that next meeting, ask yourself: "Could this be an email?" If the purpose is simply to share information, gather status updates, or conduct unstructured brainstorming, the answer is likely yes. Respect your colleagues' time (and your own!) by choosing the right communication tool for the job. Your future, less-meeting-filled self will thank you.