Let me be clear about something before we go any further.
I am not a quiet person. In the right setting – among people I actually like, in conversations that actually matter, at a dinner table where the wine is good and the company is better – I will talk your ear off. Happily. Enthusiastically. For hours. If I am talking a lot, I am engaged. I am present. I am vibing with you on a cellular level.
Work? Work is where my direct deposit lives. That is the pinnacle of that relationship. No emotional capital required. No additional investment expected. You pay me. I deliver. We go home.
So, when you schedule a meeting that could have been a compactly worded email – or a PowerPoint deck if you want to be fancy about it – and then proceed to use that meeting to demonstrate that you have never once in your professional life been required to get to the point, I want you to know that I am sitting across from you in the full presence of my body while approximately zero percent of my actual self is in that room.
And I am thinking things.
What I am thinking while you are talking.
Minute one. Okay. Setting the stage. Fine. I can work with this.
Minute two. We are still setting the stage. The stage has been set. The curtain has gone up. The actors are in position. We can begin the play now.
Minute three. We are not beginning the play. We are still describing the stage. In detail. The color of the curtains. The texture of the floor. A brief history of the theater itself and how it came to be in this neighborhood. Thank you for this information that I did not ask for and will not use.
Minute four. I have recapped everything you have said so far into two sentences in my head. I did this thirty seconds ago. I have since moved on to planning what I am having for dinner, reconsidering a financial decision I made in 2019, and mentally redecorating a room in my house.
Minute five. You are still talking.
You take a sip of water. Your throat is a dry desert from the sustained oration. This is the moment I have been waiting for. I recap your five-minute diatribe into two sentences. Out loud. With the specific energy of someone who has been paying close attention and absolutely has not been thinking about dinner.
Nobody notices the sarcasm. I believe this to be true because most people in the room have been in the same mental vacation I have been on and have only just reconnected their brain to their ears because someone other than you is speaking now.
“Oh,” their faces say. “That is what Mary was babbling on about.”
Yes. That is what Mary was babbling on about. You are welcome.
A brief taxonomy of meeting offenders.
There are several distinct species of meeting bloviation and I have studied them with the dedication of a field researcher who did not sign up for this assignment.
First – Millennial Mary.
Millennial Mary ends every sentence with a question mark. Not because she is asking a question. Because her vocal cords have been trained by a generation of uncertainty to present all information as though it requires your validation before it can be considered real. She also speaks with a level of vocal fry that makes me want to reach across the conference table and not-so-gently tap her on the throat to see if it will recalibrate the mechanism. It will not. I know this. I do not attempt it. But I think about it.
Everything Millennial Mary says goes up at the end. Even directives. Even conclusions. Even the sentence “This project is due Friday?” has the energy of a question she is not sure you will agree with. Mary. Friday is Friday. It does not require your uncertainty. State the thing.
Second – Boomer Mary.
Boomer Mary has arrived at this meeting with context. So much context. Personal context. Historical context. Context about her children, her dogs, a vacation she took seventeen years ago that is somehow relevant to the Q3 projections. She is going to share all of it with you because she has lived a full and interesting life and it would be a disservice to the room not to benefit from her accumulated wisdom.
Boomer Mary, I say this with the deepest respect available to me in this moment: I do not care. I do not care about the children. I do not care about the dogs. I especially do not care about the vacation. What part of any of this is work related? What line item in the meeting agenda covers the formative years of your eldest and their current relationship with gluten?
I am not asking you to answer that. It is a rhetorical question. Do not answer it.
The bloviation problem and why it actually matters.
I am being darkly satirical about this – as is my right and my calling – but underneath the comedy is a real thing worth saying.
Unnecessary meetings are a documented productivity crisis. The average employee loses 2.5 hours every day to meetings and related interruptions. Research consistently shows that most meetings could be replaced by a well-written email or asynchronous communication without any loss of information or outcome.
What is lost when meetings replace communication is not connection. It is time. It is the cognitive bandwidth required to sit in a room and process someone else’s verbal processing in real time when you could have read the same information in four minutes and gotten back to work.
For people who have made a clean and conscious separation between work and personal life – who show up, deliver excellence, and expect the same efficiency in return – sitting in unnecessary meetings is not just annoying. It is a tax on the only nonrenewable resource any of us actually have. Time. My time has a value and that value is not being honored when you are on minute four of a five-minute sentence about absolutely nothing. I am not here to process your feelings about the project. I am here to do the project. Get to the point. Send the email. Mary, I say this with every ounce of love available to me in a professional setting – nobody is learning anything while you are talking.
What the meeting could have been.
An email. A short one. Subject line that actually describes the content. Three to five sentences. One clear ask or one clear piece of information. A deadline if applicable. Send.
I read it in four minutes. I respond in two. We have both saved forty-five minutes and nobody’s vocal fry has been activated.
Or – if you want to be fancy – a PowerPoint deck. Five slides maximum. One idea per slide. No full sentences on the slides, those go in the speaker notes that I will read instead of attending the presentation. Send it to me. I will review it. If I have questions I will email them.
This is not antisocial. This is efficient. This is what it looks like when you respect other people’s time and cognitive resources enough to get to the point before their internal monologue has planned three meals and redecorated a room.
I do not dislike people. Well, um, not all of them. Um, well, I maintain a small group of people I actually like? Okay, darn, you’ve forced it out of me- I think people are generally disingenuous and it’s tiring in a way that makes me understand Noah & the ark. Truth.
I dislike people who force me to expend energy listening to their malformed TED talks about complete foolishness when a two-sentence email would have served everyone better and left us all with forty-five minutes of our lives back.
That is a very specific and reasonable position and I stand by it completely.
Now. Was there anything else or can I go back to work?
What is your most memorable meeting that absolutely could have been an email? Drop it in the comments. I know you have one.
