The 4 Meetings That Should Be Emails (and the 1 Email That Should Be a Meeting)

"This could have been an email" is a phrase corporate culture has decided to absorb without changing. It is now a coffee mug. It is now a Slack reaction. It is now a thing people say after the meeting, in a different meeting, about the meeting they just left.

Below, the four specific meeting types that — if your manager ran a clean operation — would not exist. And the one email that, against all instinct, should be pulled into a room.

1. The 30-minute "quick sync"

Manager OTG sends this invite on Monday at 4:38 PM. The invite has no agenda. The subject line is "Quick sync re: Q3 stuff." The duration is 30 minutes. The duration is always 30 minutes because his calendar tool's default is 30 minutes and he has not, in eleven years, changed it.

The actual content of this meeting is: he has read something on Substack over the weekend, has had a feeling about it, and would like to test the feeling on you out loud while drinking a cold brew. You will be on camera. He will be on camera for the first eleven minutes, then off camera for the next nineteen, during which his voice will continue while he eats a bagel.

What this could be: a four-line Slack message reading, verbatim, "Read this — curious if you have thoughts. No rush." Followed by the link. Followed by your one-line reply six hours later.

What it will be: 47 minutes. Because of course it will run over.

2. The standup that is also a meeting

A daily standup is, theoretically, a 10-minute synchronous status update. The team gathers. Each person says, in 90 seconds: what they did yesterday, what they're doing today, what's blocked.

Manager OTG runs a daily standup. It is 30 minutes long. It is on Zoom. Halfway through, he says, "Greg, while we have everyone, can you walk through that thing from yesterday's email?" The thing from yesterday's email is then walked through. It takes nine minutes. It involves screen-sharing. The other six people, none of whom needed to hear it, do not say so. They are on mute. They are technically attending.

What this could be: a Slack thread. Three lines per person. Posted before 10:00 AM. Read in two minutes. Nobody on camera. Nobody pretending to look at a deck about another team's burndown.

What it will be: a permanent meeting on your calendar that you will, six months from now, still attend.

3. The alignment touch-base

This is the meeting where two managers, who are theoretically peers, meet to "make sure we're on the same page." There is no decision to be made. There is no project being worked on jointly. There is, technically, no reason for either of them to talk to each other this week.

The meeting exists because they each believe the other is "out of the loop" on something, and the meeting is the proof, after the fact, that they were not out of the loop. The meeting is, in this sense, a paper trail without paper.

Manager OTG schedules this meeting recurring. Bi-weekly. Two managers can sustain a recurring bi-weekly touch-base for years. They have nothing to discuss. They discuss it for 30 minutes. They then both write, in their respective performance reviews, that they have "strong cross-functional partnerships."

What this could be: nothing. The thing it could be replaced with is nothing. The meeting could be canceled and the work would proceed, identically, without it.

What it will be: a recurring entry on your boss's calendar until one of them changes jobs, at which point the new person will also schedule it.

4. The kickoff for the project that has already kicked off

The project started three weeks ago. People have already done work. There is a Notion doc. There are pull requests open. The slack channel is, at this point, archived from a previous version of the same project.

Manager OTG schedules a "Project Kickoff" for Thursday at 11:00 AM. The invite goes out to eleven people, four of whom have never heard of the project. The meeting will be 60 minutes. The first 12 minutes will be Manager OTG explaining what the project is to the four people who haven't heard of it, in the presence of the seven people who already know. Those seven people will be off mute and silent. They will be triaging their inboxes.

What this could be: a Loom video. Three minutes long. Watched at 1.5x by anyone who actually needs to be onboarded. Skipped by everyone else.

What it will be: a kickoff meeting, after the fact, that also requires a "kickoff readout" Slack to be sent — by you — summarizing what happened in the kickoff that did not need to happen.

The one email that should be a meeting

It is the email titled "Quick update on org changes." It is sent on a Wednesday at 5:47 PM. It is from Dana, your VP. It is addressed to the team distribution list. It contains the phrases "exciting new structure," "doubling down," and "investing in growth areas."

The email describes, in 480 words, a reorganization that affects everyone reading the email. Five people are getting new managers. Two teams are merging. One team, by absence from the email, has been quietly disbanded — its members reassigned, individually, in the bullet points. Nobody on the disbanded team realizes this until they re-read the email at 7:12 PM that night, looking for their own name, and notice they appear only as "and existing members will transition to support priority work streams."

This email should not be an email. This email should be a meeting. The meeting should be on Wednesday morning, not Wednesday at 5:47 PM. The meeting should be in person, or at minimum on camera. The meeting should allow questions to be asked of an actual human voice rather than typed into a slack channel that, by 9:30 PM, has 28 messages and four typos in the channel's pinned response.

It will, however, be an email. The email will be followed, on Thursday morning, by a series of 30-minute "quick syncs" — one per affected employee — in which Manager OTG will explain what the email already explained, while making clear, with his hands and his eye contact, that he was, personally, advocating for you the whole time. He was not advocating for you. He read the email at 5:47 PM, same as you. The hand gestures are his thinking, in real time, about what to say next.

That meeting, the one that should have replaced the email, never happens. The email stays an email. The conversation stays in your DMs. The org change goes through. Marcus, by Friday, has updated his LinkedIn.