It’s long. Weekends here in the United States mean that office workers, at least, get a three-day break from the dreaded meeting. We’d like to take this time to provide an unexpected defense of … email.
Listen to us. It’s common wisdom that meetings are productivity and morale killers and happy work environments. So why not write an email?
We know that email also has its drawbacks – it’s hard to manage and it’s full of spam. But as work moves more online, it’s better than meetings. Two inbox zeroes and a Chaos Muppet drowning in notifications – see if you can guess who’s who! – Tell me why.
Ram Iyer: Do you love meetings or hate writing?
When I was smoking, I was working on an article to be published, often and in very fruitless meetings. Most of our group of over 20 people just sat in silence for an hour while someone watched something.
If you’re counting wasted man-hours, each meeting wastes an average of 20 hours that could have been spent doing actual work. They were also unnecessarily stressful: I desperately wanted to smoke after every meeting, and I wasn’t alone.
Thankfully, that wasn’t always the case. I’ve been lucky enough to work in companies that have developed a culture of communicating mostly via email or text. But as I listened to friends and former colleagues complain about work over the past couple of years, I noticed a trend: As the pandemic sent everyone home, meetings became more and more crowded until people found their work interrupted.
I’ve asked myself this question over and over for the past two years: If email can be, why not? Why bother talking when people can write an email and save everyone’s time?
I think I finally have a theory.
