Picture a Tuesday, 10am. You suddenly remember the fortnightly team catch-up is two days away. Your to-do list is growing faster than you can cross things off, and then, ding: a calendar invite for a project kick-off lands on top of it. Be honest about your first thought. It was either please get cancelled or couldn't this just be an email?
That second thought deserves more credit than it gets. Because the numbers behind it are genuinely alarming.
The maths nobody runs
Meetings feel free because nobody invoices for them. So let's run the numbers that the calendar quietly hides:
- A 30-minute weekly meeting for a 10-person team comes to 260 working hours a year. At $50 an hour, that single recurring invite costs about $13,000 annually. One meeting.
- Shopify actually built a calculator for this. It prices a typical 30-minute, three-person meeting at $700 to $1,600, and north of $2,000 if executives are in the room. After cancelling 12,000 recurring meetings at the start of 2023, Shopify projected it would claw back 322,000 hours in a year.
- Research by meeting scientist Steven Rogelberg found organisations invest about $80,000 per employee per year in meeting time, of which roughly $25,000 is spent on meetings employees say they didn't need to attend. For a 5,000-person organisation, that's a potential $101 million a year. People in that study wanted to decline 31% of their invitations. They actually declined 14%.
- Zoom out far enough and Doodle put the cost of pointless meetings at US$399 billion a year in the United States alone.
And it's not as if workers disagree. Atlassian surveyed 5,000 knowledge workers and found meetings are considered ineffective 72% of the time, while Microsoft's Work Trend Index found inefficient meetings ranked as the number one disruptor of productivity, with the average Microsoft 365 user spending 57% of their time communicating about work and only 43% actually doing it. Executives have it worst: Harvard Business Review reports they now average nearly 23 hours a week in meetings, up from under 10 in the 1960s.
Twenty-three hours. That's not a schedule, that's a residency.
The 10-minute alternative
Now imagine the same Tuesday, except your manager has sent a well-crafted email instead. It takes them 10 focused minutes to write and you 90 seconds to read. Every update, decision, and action point, clearly laid out. No break in focus. No awkward meeting lulls while someone's screen share loads. You get the information and get straight back to work.
To head off the obvious objection: no, this is not an argument for cancelling all meetings. Brainstorms, hard conversations, decisions that need real back-and-forth, the social glue of a team actually talking to each other: keep those. The target here is the routine update meeting, the one where information flows one way and the only interaction is everyone saying "no questions from me."
For that meeting, a clear email wins on every measure that matters.
The catch: the email has to be good
Here's the part people skip. A rambling, bloated, bury-the-point email doesn't replace a meeting. It just relocates the confusion to everyone's inbox, where it breeds follow-up questions, misunderstandings and, in a final insult, a meeting to clear things up.
Writing a genuinely short, genuinely clear update is a skill. Blaise Pascal nailed the problem in 1657: "I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter." (Often credited to Mark Twain, who, in fairness, would have appreciated the irony of a misattributed quote about precision.)
Brevity takes effort. The 10-minute email that replaces a 30-minute meeting is really a writing exercise: deciding what matters, cutting what doesn't, and putting the action points where nobody can miss them.
The bigger picture
This is part of a broader shift towards treating clear writing as core business infrastructure, not a nice-to-have:
- Organisations win. Less time in update meetings means more time on the work the meetings were about.
- People win. Half an hour back might mean finishing in time for school pick-up, or simply ending the day less fried.
Clear communication isn't a luxury. When every minute counts, it's the clarity of our writing that buys those minutes back. If your team's emails aren't yet good enough to replace the meeting, that's a fixable problem, and it's exactly what we teach.