This Meeting Could Have Been an Email: How to Know for Sure

It started as a joke on a coffee mug. Then it became a meme. Then a t-shirt. Then a universal workplace mantra: “This meeting could have been an email.”

The humor lands because it’s painfully true. According to research compiled by Iseo Blue, 82% of employees say they’ve attended a meeting that could have been an email. A separate SurveyMonkey study found that 32% of workers have that exact thought during most of the meetings they attend. Not occasionally — most of the time.

And the problem isn’t just annoyance. It’s money and productivity. Unproductive meetings cost the U.S. economy an estimated $37 billion per year, according to research widely cited from Harvard Business Review. When you multiply the hourly cost of every attendee by the hours spent in meetings that didn’t need to happen, the number is staggering — and almost entirely preventable.

The phrase “this meeting could have been an email” has been around long enough. It’s time to actually do something about it.

Why We Default to Meetings

Before we solve the problem, it helps to understand why it exists. People don’t schedule unnecessary meetings because they enjoy wasting time. They do it because of several deeply ingrained workplace habits.

Meetings feel like action. Scheduling a meeting gives the impression that something is happening — that progress is being made. In reality, the meeting itself isn’t progress. The decisions and work that follow are. But the calendar invite provides an immediate sense of momentum that an email or document doesn’t.

Meetings feel inclusive. There’s a social pressure to include people, and a meeting is the easiest way to make everyone feel involved. The alternative — writing a clear email and sending it to the right people — requires more thought about who actually needs to know what. A meeting invite is a shortcut that avoids that thinking.

Meetings are the path of least resistance. It takes about 30 seconds to create a calendar invite and add 10 people. Writing a clear, well-structured email that conveys the same information takes 15-20 minutes of focused thought. For many people, the meeting is simply easier to schedule than the email is to write.

Meetings feel safer. In many organizations, skipping a meeting or declining an invite can be perceived as disengagement. Scheduling one, on the other hand, signals diligence. This creates a culture where meetings proliferate not because they’re effective, but because they’re socially expected.

The Email Test: Five Questions

Here’s a straightforward framework. Before sending any calendar invite, ask yourself these five questions. If you answer “yes” to three or more, the meeting should probably be an email (or a message, or a document).

Is the primary purpose to share information? If you’re planning to talk at people rather than with them — delivering a status update, announcing a decision, sharing results — that’s a one-way broadcast. Email was built for exactly this. It lets recipients absorb the information when it suits their schedule, re-read anything unclear, and respond only if they have questions.

Could most attendees be passive listeners? If more than half the people on the invite list are there “for visibility” or “to stay in the loop,” they don’t need a meeting. They need an email or a brief written update. Meetings are only worth the cost when most people in the room are actively contributing to the conversation.

Is the topic straightforward with no expected debate? If there’s a clear answer, a simple decision, or a factual update, email handles it better. Meetings are most valuable when there’s genuine ambiguity, disagreement, or complexity that benefits from real-time discussion. If everyone’s going to nod along and agree, save the meeting.

Can people respond at their own pace? If the response doesn’t need to happen in real time — if people can think about it overnight, check their data, or consult their team before replying — asynchronous communication is the better choice. You’ll actually get higher-quality responses because people have time to be thoughtful rather than reactive.

Is this a recurring meeting without a clear agenda? If you have a weekly meeting that doesn’t have a specific agenda this week, cancel it. Send a Slack message saying “Nothing pressing this week — skipping the sync.” Your team will thank you. Fellow’s research found that 92.4% of recurring meetings have no end date, which means they run indefinitely whether they’re useful or not.

When a Meeting Actually Is the Right Call

The flip side of this framework is equally important. Some situations genuinely call for a meeting, and trying to handle them over email will make things worse.

Complex decisions with multiple stakeholders work better in meetings. When you need three different perspectives to collide, when trade-offs need to be weighed in real time, and when the outcome depends on alignment that can only happen through dialogue, a meeting is worth it.

Sensitive or emotional topics almost always deserve a meeting. Delivering difficult feedback, navigating a disagreement, or discussing performance requires the nuance of tone, facial expressions, and real-time empathy that email strips away. The potential for misunderstanding over email is too high.

Creative brainstorming benefits from live energy. While there’s strong research supporting “brainwriting” (individual ideation before group discussion), the group discussion itself — where one idea sparks another — is genuinely better in person or on a call. Asana research shows that the most productive approach combines individual reflection with live collaboration.

Time-sensitive problems need meetings. When something is broken, when a deadline is at risk, or when coordination needs to happen in minutes rather than hours, a quick huddle can resolve what would take a long email thread to sort out.

The Real-World Impact of Getting This Right

The savings from converting even a fraction of unnecessary meetings to emails are significant. Consider a team of 10 people earning an average of $85,000 per year. Their hourly rate is roughly $41 per person.

A single one-hour weekly meeting with all 10 people costs approximately $410 per session, or $21,320 per year. If that meeting could be replaced by a 15-minute weekly email update that takes one person to write, the cost drops to roughly $10 per week — a savings of over $20,000 annually from a single meeting.

Now consider that the average professional sits in 8-10 meetings per week. If even two of those could be emails, the individual recovers 2 hours of productive time per week — over 100 hours per year. Across a 100-person organization, that’s 10,000 hours of recovered productivity.

And that’s just the direct time savings. When you factor in context switching — the 23 minutes it takes to regain deep focus after each meeting interruption, according to Gloria Mark’s research at UC Irvine — the true savings are substantially higher.

Making the Shift Stick

Knowing the difference between a meeting and an email is the easy part. Changing the habit is harder. Here are a few approaches that work.

Make it a team norm. Agree as a group that before anyone schedules a meeting, they’ll first ask: “Could this be an email?” Some teams even add a required field to their meeting invite template: “Why can’t this be async?” If you can’t fill in that field, you probably have your answer.

Lead by example. The first time a manager cancels a meeting and sends a well-written email instead — and explicitly says “I’m sending this as an email because it doesn’t require a live discussion” — it gives everyone else permission to do the same.

Celebrate the cancel. When someone converts a meeting to an email, call it out positively in the team channel. “Thanks for sending this as an update instead of booking a meeting — saved everyone an hour today.” Positive reinforcement changes behavior faster than policy.

Use a decision tool. This is exactly why we built Meeting Or Not — a 30-second quiz that helps you decide whether your communication should be a meeting, an email, a message, or a document. Running the quiz before each calendar invite takes seconds and can save hours over the course of a week.

The Bottom Line

“This meeting could have been an email” isn’t just a punchline. It’s a daily reality for millions of workers, and it represents one of the largest untapped productivity gains in most organizations.

The fix doesn’t require new software, a reorganization, or a culture overhaul. It requires a moment of intention — a 30-second pause before clicking “Send Invite” to ask whether this communication truly requires everyone to stop what they’re doing and be in the same room at the same time.

Most of the time, the answer is no.