The Meeting That Should Have Been an Email Was Actually a Power Ritual
Forty minutes, eleven people, one decision already made before anyone sat down. 'This should have been an email' is the wrong complaint — and knowing why is the difference between being annoyed and being effective.
The decision had been made on Tuesday. I know this because I was in the hallway on Tuesday when it was made, standing near enough to hear two people agree on it in about nine seconds, the way you agree to get lunch.
The meeting was Thursday. Forty minutes. Eleven people, four of them dialing in from three time zones, one of them visibly eating. There was a deck. The deck had a slide titled Options, and the options were the thing that had already been settled on, plus two alternatives constructed with such obvious care to be worse that they functioned less like choices than like bodyguards.
At minute thirty-eight we selected the option chosen on Tuesday. Someone said great discussion. Someone else typed a summary into a channel where it received four thumbs-up emoji and no reply.
And in the sixty seconds after the call dropped, three separate people messaged me some version of the same sentence — the sentence, the one every knowledge worker on earth has typed into some private window while pretending to look at a shared screen:
that should have been an email.
They were right about the information. They were wrong about the meeting. And the gap between those two things is where most people's careers quietly go to die.
The complaint is a category error
Here's the thing that took me an embarrassingly long time to understand, and I want to state it plainly before dressing it up.
When you say a meeting should have been an email, you are evaluating it as an information delivery system. On that metric, you're almost always right. Forty minutes to convey what fits in nine lines is an atrocious data rate, and if the meeting's purpose were transmission, it would be one of the worst technologies ever devised — worse than the telegram, worse than shouting.
But nobody scheduled that meeting to transmit information. They scheduled it to do something to the room.
A decision announced in an email is a decision one person made. The same decision reached at minute thirty-eight of a Thursday call, after eleven people have watched a slide titled Options and murmured assent, is a decision the group made. Nothing about the content changed. Everything about the ownership did.
That transformation is the product. The forty minutes is the manufacturing cost.
What the phrase actually means
"I want to get everyone's input on this."
Translation: I want everyone's fingerprints on this. Input is occasionally sought. Fingerprints are always collected. The two are so easy to confuse because the ritual is designed to make them feel identical — you were asked, you spoke, you were heard, and you are now, in a way that will matter later, a co-signer.
Parkinson found the seam in 1957
The best description of what meetings actually optimize for was written sixty-nine years ago by a British naval historian who was not trying to be a management theorist.
In Parkinson's Law, or the Pursuit of Progress (1957), C. Northcote Parkinson describes a finance committee working through an agenda. Three items. The first is a £10 million atomic reactor. The committee disposes of it in two and a half minutes — nobody in the room understands reactor construction, the experts say the plans are sound, and there is nothing for a non-expert to contribute except a vote.
The second item is a £350 bicycle shed for the staff. This one takes forty-five minutes. Brick or wood. Dimensions. The roof. The color.
The third item is £21 a year for refreshments. It takes an hour and fifteen minutes, and ends without resolution.
Parkinson's formulation is one sentence, and it is doing more work than most business books:
“The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.
”
The usual reading of this is that committees are stupid — that people avoid hard problems and gravitate to easy ones. That reading is comfortable and it is wrong, or at least it stops one step too early.
The committee isn't failing to discuss the reactor. There is nothing for the committee to do with the reactor. No member can meaningfully contribute, so no member can accrue standing by contributing. The reactor is a decision that has already been made somewhere else by people with expertise, and the committee's function on that item is purely notarial.
The bike shed is different. Everyone has stood in the rain. Everyone owns an opinion about wood. The bike shed is the only item on the agenda where participation is available to everyone in the room — and participation, not construction, is what a committee distributes.
That is the whole mechanism. It has not changed. We have simply moved it onto video calls and given it a recurring slot.
The four jobs, and why email can't do any of them
Strip the ritual down and there are four functions running underneath, none of which survive being written down.
1. It allocates status. Who speaks first, who speaks last, who is interrupted and by whom, who gets the "let's take that offline," whose objection reopens a closed item and whose does not. A meeting is a live-updating leaderboard, and everyone in it is reading their position continuously, whether or not they'd admit it. Email flattens this. That's exactly why email can't replace it — and why the people who most want the email are frequently the people currently losing on the leaderboard.
2. It distributes liability. This is the load-bearing one. When something goes wrong in six months, the record will show that eleven people were consulted. Not one of them will remember objecting. The meeting converts an individual bet into an institutional one, and institutional bets do not end anyone's career. If you have ever wondered why the invite list keeps growing, this is why: the list is not a distribution list. It's an insurance pool.
3. It manufactures consent. There is a real difference between being informed of a decision and being present at it, and the difference is not informational. It's ceremonial. People will implement, with genuine energy, a decision they mildly disagree with if they watched it happen. The same people will slow-walk an identical decision that arrived in their inbox. This is not irrationality. It's a completely reasonable response to a system where presence is the only evidence you were ever consulted.
4. It synchronizes belief. Not what people know — what people know that other people know. A meeting creates common knowledge: everyone saw everyone else see it. That's a genuinely different state from eleven individuals each having read the same message, and it is the one thing on this list that a document truly cannot produce.
The test that reframes everything
Before you decide a meeting was a waste, ask: what would have been different if this had been an email?
If the answer is "nothing, except it would have taken four minutes" — you're right, it was waste. If the answer is "half the room would have quietly ignored it," or "one person would now own a decision that eleven people currently own," then the meeting worked. You just weren't its beneficiary.
The numbers say the ritual is metastasizing
None of this would matter much if the ritual were rare. It isn't, and the trend line is not subtle.
Microsoft's Work Trend Index reported that meetings per week had risen 153% globally for the average Teams user since the start of the pandemic — and that overlapping, double-booked meetings had risen 46% per person in a single year. Being in two places at once stopped being a scheduling error and became a normal Tuesday.
More recent telemetry, drawn from Microsoft 365 usage through February 2025, describes something stranger than a full calendar:
Fifty-seven percent of meetings now happen with no invite — which means most of the ritual has escaped the calendar entirely and can no longer be measured, declined, or defended against. One in ten scheduled meetings is booked at the last minute. Half of all meetings land between 9–11 a.m. and 1–3 p.m., which is to say they colonize precisely the hours where sustained work is possible. Tuesday carries 23% of the weekly load; Friday, 16%.
And the fastest-growing category is meetings with 65 or more attendees — a number at which the leaderboard, the insurance pool, and the consent ceremony are the only remaining functions, because at sixty-five people nobody is deciding anything.
Here's the figure that reframed this whole piece for me. Over two years, Microsoft found that meeting acceptance grew by 3%. In the same window, declines grew 84% and tentative RSVPs grew 216%.
People are not passively drowning. They are actively, measurably trying to get out — declining more, hedging vastly more — and the volume went up anyway.
The part where I stop being clever
Everything above can be read as a shrug. Meetings are rituals, rituals are load-bearing, stop complaining. That reading is available and I want to close it off, because it's the version of this argument that gets used by the wrong people.
The ritual is real. It is also expensive, and the bill is not split evenly.
Rogelberg and colleagues, in a 2011 paper bluntly titled Wasted Time and Money in Meetings, estimated that most organizations devote 7% to 15% of their personnel budgets to meetings. They cite a 1995 estimate that a single 24,000-person Xerox unit spent $100.4 million a year on them. They also surveyed HR leaders at Fortune 500 firms and found that organizations do essentially nothing to assess the return on that spend — a company that would demand a business case for a $40,000 software license routinely runs a nine-figure meeting program with no instrumentation at all.
If you run a small business, this arithmetic is not abstract and it is not somebody else's problem. Every hour in a room is an hour of capacity you have already paid for and cannot resell, and if you have never once priced your own time properly, you are almost certainly running the same unmeasured program at a smaller scale.
But the real cost isn't budgetary, and here's the turn.
A ritual that distributes status distributes it unequally, and the people who pay most are the people who can least afford to decline. The senior person who skips the Thursday call is decisive. The junior person who skips it is disengaged. The person who holds the institutional memory gets pulled into every meeting precisely because they're the only one who knows why the fence is there — and is then judged on output they had no hours left to produce. The declines are up 84% and the volume rose anyway because the people declining are not the people scheduling.
That's not a meeting problem. It's the informal power structure doing what it always does, using the calendar as its instrument. The calendar is simply the most honest org chart your company publishes, because unlike the real one, nobody thought to sanitize it.
And every hour of it is drawn from the same finite account as everything else you might have done that day — a balance nobody hands you a statement for, which is exactly why it disappears without anyone noticing.
What to actually do on Tuesday
Not "decline more meetings." You've heard that, it's useless, and in most jobs it's career-negative advice delivered by people with the standing to survive it.
- 1
Classify before you resent
Before every recurring meeting, name which of the four jobs it's doing: status, liability, consent, or synchronization. Most do one. If you genuinely can't name one, that's the meeting to challenge — and now you can challenge it on function rather than on vibes.
- 2
Never decline the liability meetings
If a meeting exists to spread accountability for something that might fail, be in the pool. This is the single most expensive mistake capable people make: skipping the boring call about the risky project, then being the only name not on the consultation list when it goes wrong.
- 3
Trade presence for the artifact
The strongest move available to almost anyone: "I'll write the summary." You skip nothing, you gain the pen. Whoever writes the record decides what the meeting decided, and that authorship is almost always sitting unclaimed on the table because it looks like clerical work.
- 4
Move your bike shed to the top
If you run the agenda, Parkinson gives you a free lever: put the trivial, everyone-has-an-opinion item first and timebox it hard. The participation appetite gets spent on something cheap, and the expensive item gets the room's remaining attention instead of its exhausted goodwill.
- 5
Audit the 57%
The ad hoc calls with no invite are the ones eating your week invisibly, because nothing that isn't on a calendar can be counted. Log them for two weeks — just start and end times. Most people find the unscheduled load is larger than the scheduled one, and you cannot make an argument about a number you have never collected.
Isn't this just an elaborate excuse for bad management?
Partly, yes — and that's the strongest objection here, so it deserves a real answer rather than a deflection. A great deal of meeting volume is simply managers who cannot write, cannot decide alone, or are performing busyness. Explaining the function of a ritual is not the same as endorsing every instance of it. But "bad management" as a total explanation predicts that good managers would hold dramatically fewer meetings, and they mostly don't — they hold better ones, with the same four jobs running underneath. If the diagnosis were purely incompetence, the cure would have worked by now.
If meetings are so valuable, why does everyone hate them?
Because the four functions produce value for the organization while charging the cost to the individual, and those are different balance sheets. Liability distribution is enormously valuable to a company and feels, from inside a chair at 4:40 p.m., like nothing at all. That mismatch is the entire emotional experience of a bad meeting: you can sense that something is happening and correctly perceive that it isn't happening to your benefit.
Does any of this apply to a five-person business?
Yes, and more sharply. Parkinson's committee had the excuse of scale. At five people, the status and liability functions still run — they just run without the cover of a large room, which makes them easier to see and much harder to pretend aren't happening. The small-company version is the standing Monday call that everyone privately knows is about reassurance rather than coordination, which is a legitimate purpose that would survive being named out loud.
What about the meetings that genuinely are just information transfer?
Kill them. Those are the ones the complaint is actually about, and they're real: the status round-robin where nine people listen to seven updates that concern them not at all. The test in the callout above will find them in about four seconds. What the complaint gets wrong is generalizing from those to every meeting that felt slow.
Back to Thursday
I've thought about that call a lot since — the eleven people, the deck, the two bodyguard options standing on either side of a decision that had been made in a hallway in nine seconds.
I still think it should have been an email. I now also think that if it had been an email, the decision would have been one person's, and in March, when the thing it authorized went sideways, that person would have been alone with it. Instead, eleven people had murmured assent at a slide, and the failure arrived pre-distributed, absorbed by an institution the way a bumper absorbs a low-speed collision. Nobody's career moved an inch. That was the product. It was delivered on time.
The forty minutes bought exactly what it was supposed to buy. It's just that nobody costed it, nobody wrote it down, and nobody asked the four people in three time zones whether they'd have chosen to fund it.
So: stop asking whether the meeting should have been an email. Start asking what it's for, who it's for, and whether that's you. One of those questions makes you feel briefly superior on a Thursday afternoon. The other one gets you out of the chair.
It's just business.
Sources
- Parkinson's Law, or the Pursuit of Progress (1957), ch. 3 — 'High Finance, or the Point of Vanishing Interest'
How this was checked
C. Northcote Parkinson's committee example: £10m reactor, £350 bicycle shed, £21 refreshments.
- Microsoft Work Trend Index — 'Hybrid Work Is Just Work. Are We Doing It Wrong?'
How this was checked
153% rise in weekly meetings; 46% rise in overlapping meetings; declines +84%, tentative RSVPs +216%, acceptance +3%; 42% multitask.
- Microsoft Work Trend Index — 'Breaking down the infinite workday'
How this was checked
Microsoft 365 telemetry through February 2025: 57% of meetings ad hoc; interruption every 2 minutes; after-8pm meetings +16% YoY; Tuesday 23% vs Friday 16%; 65+ attendee meetings fastest-growing.
- SHRM — 'Fewer Meetings Can Boost Employee and Organization Productivity'
How this was checked
Summarizes Rogelberg et al., 'Wasted Time and Money in Meetings' (2011): 7–15% of personnel budgets; the 1995 Xerox $100.4m estimate; Fortune 500 HR leaders assess meeting ROI essentially not at all.
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This article is educational and satirical content from Business Dog. It is not financial, legal, or tax advice. It's just business.