Should this be
a meeting?
Answer 6 quick questions and we'll tell you the most effective format for your communication.
This should be an email.
Based on your answers, this doesn't need a live meeting.
If it is a meeting, find out what it'll cost your company.
Try Meeting Price Tag โHow the Meeting Decision Tool Works
Not every workplace communication needs a live meeting. In fact, research by Asana found that 48% of employees said their most recent meeting was unnecessary, and 82% report having attended meetings that could have been handled through email. The problem isn't that meetings are inherently bad โ it's that most teams default to scheduling one without considering whether a different format would be more effective.
Meeting Or Not helps you make that decision in about 30 seconds. The quiz evaluates six key dimensions of your communication need: the primary goal (decision, update, brainstorm, or feedback), the number of people involved, urgency level, expected interaction depth, topic complexity, and what a successful outcome looks like.
Each answer carries a weighted score across four possible formats โ live meeting, email, quick message (Slack or Teams), and shared document. When the quiz is complete, the tool tallies the scores and recommends the format with the highest match, along with a confidence percentage and the specific reasoning behind the recommendation. No signup required, no data collected โ the entire quiz runs locally in your browser.
When to Use Each Communication Format
Choosing the right format isn't about personal preference โ it's about matching the nature of the communication to the strengths of each channel. Here's when each format works best and when it doesn't.
Live Meeting
Best for: Complex decisions requiring group input, creative brainstorming, sensitive conversations, and rapid problem-solving where real-time back-and-forth is essential.
Not ideal for: Status updates, one-way announcements, topics where most attendees are passive listeners, or anything that can be resolved with a short written exchange.
Best for: Sharing updates with large groups, communicating information that needs a written record, follow-ups and recaps, and any message where recipients can respond on their own schedule.
Not ideal for: Topics requiring heavy discussion, time-sensitive decisions, or nuanced conversations where tone and empathy matter.
Quick Message
Best for: Simple questions with clear answers, brief coordination ("I'm pushing the deploy to tomorrow"), informal check-ins, and lightweight updates that don't need the formality of email.
Not ideal for: Complex topics, conversations involving more than 3-4 people, anything requiring a paper trail, or discussions that might need reference later.
Shared Document
Best for: Gathering feedback from multiple contributors, collaborative writing and editing, reference materials that need to be accessed over time, and complex topics that require reading and reflection.
Not ideal for: Urgent decisions, simple questions, or topics where the discussion needs to happen in real time.
Why Choosing the Right Format Matters
The cost of defaulting to meetings for everything is substantial. According to data from Flowtrace's analysis of over 1.3 million workplace meetings, meeting time costs organizations an average of $29,000 per employee per year. The average employee now spends 392 hours annually in meetings โ more than 16 full workdays.
But the salary cost is only part of the picture. Research by Gloria Mark at the University of California, Irvine found that it takes an average of 23 minutes to regain deep focus after an interruption. Every unnecessary meeting doesn't just consume the time you're in it โ it also taxes the productive time on either side through context switching and what researchers call the "meeting shadow" effect, where people avoid starting deep work in the 15-30 minutes before a meeting because they know they'll be interrupted.
When you add it all up, a single unnecessary one-hour meeting with five people can cost the equivalent of 8-10 person-hours of productive time. Multiply that by the number of unnecessary meetings held across an entire organization every week, and you begin to see why Asana's research found that time wasted in unproductive meetings has doubled since 2019, reaching an average of 5 hours per week per employee.
The solution isn't to eliminate meetings โ some conversations genuinely require real-time interaction. The solution is to be intentional about format selection, using the right tool for the right job. A 30-second quiz before each calendar invite can save thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars across an organization every year.
5 Questions to Ask Before Scheduling Any Meeting
Can I write this in two paragraphs?
If the information you need to communicate can be clearly expressed in a short written message, it almost certainly doesn't need a meeting. Write the email, send the Slack message, or post the update. Save meetings for topics that genuinely require discussion.
Do I need real-time reactions?
If the value of the meeting is in hearing immediate responses, reading body language, or building on each other's ideas live, a meeting is justified. If people can respond thoughtfully on their own schedule, async is better โ you'll actually get higher-quality input.
How many people actually need to participate?
There's a difference between people who need to contribute and people who just need to be informed. If more than half your attendee list is there "for visibility," send them the notes afterward instead. Meetings get exponentially less efficient as the group grows beyond 5-6 people.
What's the one specific outcome I need?
Every meeting should have a single clear outcome: a decision made, a problem solved, a plan aligned on. If you can't articulate the specific outcome in one sentence, the meeting isn't ready to be scheduled. Define the outcome first, then decide if a meeting is the best way to achieve it.
Have I tried async first?
Before booking a meeting, try the async version. Post the question in your team channel, share the document for comments, or send a brief video walkthrough. If async doesn't resolve it within a day, then schedule the meeting โ you'll have better context for it and the meeting will be shorter and more focused.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does the quiz determine the right format?
Each of the six questions evaluates a different dimension of your communication need. Every answer option carries weighted scores across four possible formats: meeting, email, message, and document. When the quiz is complete, the tool adds up the scores for each format and recommends the one with the highest total. The confidence percentage reflects how strongly the winning format scored relative to the alternatives โ a high confidence means the recommendation is clear, while a lower confidence suggests multiple formats could work.
Is this quiz based on actual research?
The scoring model is informed by research on meeting effectiveness, communication psychology, and workplace productivity โ including studies from Harvard Business Review, Atlassian, Asana, and Microsoft's Work Trend Index. The question design draws on established frameworks for evaluating communication needs, such as urgency-complexity matrices and interaction depth models used in organizational communication research.
Is my data stored or collected?
No. Meeting Or Not runs entirely in your browser. We do not collect, store, or transmit any of your quiz answers or results. The quiz logic executes on your device and nothing is sent to any server. The only data stored locally is your theme preference (dark or light mode), saved in your browser's local storage.
Can I use this tool with my team?
Absolutely. Many teams use Meeting Or Not as a quick checkpoint before scheduling meetings. Some adopt it as a team norm: before creating a calendar invite, run the quiz. If the result says "email" or "document," try that first. The share feature makes it easy to send your result to colleagues, which can help build a culture of intentional communication format selection.
What's the relationship between Meeting Or Not and Meeting Price Tag?
They're companion tools. Meeting Or Not helps you decide whether a meeting is the right format for your communication. If it is, Meeting Price Tag (at meetingpricetag.com) lets you see the real-time cost of that meeting in salary dollars. Together, they help teams be more intentional about how they spend their meeting time and budget.
Why only four format options?
We focused on the four formats that cover the vast majority of workplace communication: live meetings, email, quick messages (Slack, Teams, etc.), and shared documents (Google Docs, Notion, etc.). While there are other formats like video messages, voice memos, or in-person hallway conversations, these four categories account for roughly 95% of the communication decisions knowledge workers face daily, and most other formats map naturally to one of these four categories.
It Is a Meeting? Find Out What It Costs.
If the quiz says your communication needs a live meeting, the next question is: how much will it cost? Our companion tool Meeting Price Tag calculates the real-time salary cost of your meetings โ just enter the number of attendees and average salary, hit start, and watch the dollars tick up as the meeting runs.
Try Meeting Price Tag โ