Ever been in a room and wanted to leave? There were seven of us, the business owner, COO, Head of Technology, me, two managers – and we all wanted to leave.
Where’s the seventh, you ask. The last person is dialling in remotely and saying, “Sorry, can you hear me?” every few minutes. A tray of biscuits is sitting on the table. I wanted to devour them just so I could feel something, anything. I wanted to live. I wanted to see my son again.
Not all meetings are like this. I love meetings. But this one…
The agenda had five items. We got through one and a half. At minute forty-seven, someone said the sentence.
“This meeting could have been an email.”
That person was me. It was said as a joke. It wasn’t a joke.
What an outsider sees
I have spent years helping organisations grow. Mapping them. Sitting with founders. Sitting with teams. Listening to people explain why things feel slow.
Time is almost always the problem.
Time kills, and the meeting is one of the most polite ways we waste it. Meetings are comforting. They feel like action. They feel collaborative and create a warm feeling of progress. But it’s just a feeling. Everyone is visible. Hooray for that.
Visibility is not velocity
A meeting is expensive. Seven people in a room for an hour is not one hour. It is seven. Add preparation. Add recovery time. Add the ten-minute drift before and after. Meetings flatten thought. They make people lose the will.
In the prison of the meeting room, these rules become law: the loudest voice wins. the quickest thinker speaks first, the cautious person hesitates.
An email, just sometimes, gives space.
- You read.
- You consider.
- You respond deliberately.
But wait, this email could be a friendly chat. And I promise you the only reason it’s an email, or a meeting, most of the time, is so when it all goes wrong there is a paper trail to apportion blame.
The protocol I now use with clients.
Before we schedule a meeting, we ask three questions.
- First: Is this information or is it decision?
- If it is either, then it is an email. Clear. Structured. With an outcome stated plainly.
- Second: Does everyone in this room need to shape the answer?
- If not, the room shrinks.
- Third: What is the decision we are making?
- If that cannot be written in one sentence, the meeting will drift.
This sounds procedural. It is not. It is cultural.
When teams start respecting time, something shifts. People prepare better. They write more clearly. They think harder before inviting others into their thinking.
Paradoxically, collaboration improves.
Because collaboration is not about gathering people. It is about clarity.
Fatigue sets in when days are broken into fragments. Half an hour here. Forty-five minutes there. No space to go deep. No uninterrupted stretch to build something properly.
That fatigue does not show up in KPIs immediately. It shows up in tone. In patience. In the erosion of morale.
I have watched high-performing teams burn out not from overwork, but from constant interruption disguised as cooperation.
Let’s all agree to communicate better.
