Could've Been an Email

How to play

Answer a handful of questions about the meeting — whether there was an agenda, whether a decision was made, how many people spoke — and get a verdict on whether it needed to exist.

Playing it well

The diagnostic question is not length or attendance, it's whether the meeting produced a decision that needed more than one person's input. Information transfer is an email. A decision requiring genuine back-and-forth is a meeting. A decision one person was always going to make alone is a meeting that exists to distribute responsibility for it.

Ways to play it

The retrospective version runs it on a recurring meeting across a month rather than a single sitting, which is the only version whose verdict anyone should act on. The pre-meeting version answers the questions from the invitation before the meeting happens — no agenda, no named decision, eight attendees — and is the rare case where the verdict can still prevent something. The inverse version asks which of your emails should have been a meeting, and typically finds one long thread that has been going in circles for a week.

What people get wrong

Judging by length is the common error; a good meeting can be an hour and a bad one can be ten minutes. The diagnostic is whether a decision needed more than one person's input in real time. The second mistake is running it on a meeting whose purpose was social, where the verdict is technically correct and completely beside the point. The third is announcing the result as the meeting ends, which is not an observation about process, it is an opinion about the person who called it.

Meeting etiquette

The verdict is funniest kept to yourself and most useful shared upward, carefully, about a recurring meeting rather than a one-off. "This one keeps coming back as an email" is a fixable observation. Announcing the verdict as the meeting ends is not a fixable observation, it's a personality.

Where it comes from

"This meeting could have been an email" became a workplace catchphrase in the 2010s and then a genuine management concern after remote work multiplied meeting load. Several large companies have since run meeting-free days, with mixed and mostly unpublished results.

Questions people ask

What actually makes a meeting necessary?

A decision that genuinely required back-and-forth between people. Information transfer is an email. A decision one person was always going to make alone is a meeting held to spread responsibility for it.

What about status meetings?

Almost always an email, with one exception — when the status is bad and someone needs to see faces to judge how bad.

Is it worth sharing the verdict?

Upward and about a recurring meeting, carefully, yes. About the meeting that just finished, no.