This Meeting Could Have Been an Email: A Test That Actually Settles It
Everyone has sat in a meeting thinking it. Very few people ever do the one thing that would settle the argument: work out what the meeting actually cost, and compare that to what it produced.
The phrase is a joke, but underneath it is a real question with a real answer. This is how to get to it without turning into the person who replies to every invite with a lecture about async culture.
First, price it
A meeting’s cost is not mysterious. It is the salary time of everyone in the room, for as long as they are in it — plus the fact that salary is not what an employer actually pays for an hour of someone’s attention. Payroll taxes, benefits, equipment, software and a share of overhead all ride on top, which is why finance teams usually multiply base pay by somewhere between 1.25 and 1.5 before they call it a cost.
Run one meeting you actually attend through the meeting cost calculator and the abstraction disappears. Six people on mid-level salaries, one hour a week, comes out in the tens of thousands of dollars a year. Not because anyone is overpaid — because 52 hours of six people’s time is a large amount of time.
Two things about that number are worth saying plainly. It is the cost of the input, not a judgement about the output: a meeting that settles something expensive can be worth many times what it cost. And it is only salary time. It does not count the context-switch either side, the preparation, or the twenty minutes afterwards spent getting back into what you were doing.
The test
Four questions. If you cannot answer the first one, nothing else matters.
1. What decision comes out of this?
Not “what do we discuss” — what is decided. A meeting that produces a decision is doing something a document cannot easily do: forcing the disagreement into the open while the people who can resolve it are present. A meeting that produces “alignment” usually produces a recording nobody watches.
If the answer is “we’ll share updates”, that is a status report, and a status report is a document.
2. Who actually needs to speak?
Count the people whose voice changes the outcome. In most recurring meetings the number is two or three, and everyone else is an audience. That is the single most reliable sign you are looking at a broadcast wearing a meeting’s clothes.
You do not have to cancel it. You can invite three people and send the rest the notes.
3. Does it need to be synchronous, or does it need to be fast?
These get confused constantly. “I need an answer today” is a deadline, not a reason to gather six calendars. A message with a clear question and a stated deadline usually gets an answer faster than the first slot everyone is free.
Genuine synchronous needs look different: a disagreement that needs tone to resolve, a decision where the objections are unknown, a conversation someone will find hard to hear in writing.
4. Would you pay for it out of your own budget?
Take the figure from the calculator and ask whether you would spend it. It is a blunt instrument and it works, because it converts a scheduling habit into a purchase decision — which is what it always was.
When the meeting genuinely wins
Async is not automatically better, and the strongest version of this argument admits that.
- The disagreement is unresolved and nobody knows where the objections are. Written threads are terrible at this. Ten replies later you discover two people were using the same word differently.
- The subject is sensitive. Bad news, feedback, anything about someone’s role. Writing it down first is a way of avoiding the conversation, and people can tell.
- The topic is genuinely new and nobody can write the document yet — because you do not know the shape of the problem until you have talked about it for twenty minutes.
- Trust is being built rather than information transferred. A new team, a new client, a first call. The inefficiency is the point.
The pattern in all four: something is unknown, and finding out requires people responding to each other in real time. Where the information already exists and just needs distributing, a meeting is a slow, expensive broadcast.
What to send instead
Cancelling a meeting without replacing it is how you end up reinstating it a month later. Replace it with something that does the same job:
- A written update with a deadline for objections. “Unless someone objects by Thursday, we’re doing X.” This does the job of most status meetings and it produces a record.
- A short recording instead of a live walkthrough. Anyone can watch at double speed, and the people who did not need it can skip it.
- A decision document. Context, the options considered, the recommendation, the open questions. Comments in the margin surface disagreement without needing a room.
- A much smaller meeting. Often the honest answer is not “no meeting” but “three of these nine people”.
If it does need to happen, keep the record
The strongest argument against most meetings is not that they are expensive — it is that they are expensive and they leave nothing behind. The decision lives in six people’s memories, in six slightly different versions, until someone reopens it a month later.
A meeting that produces a written record of what was decided and who owns what is a fundamentally different purchase. It has a durable artefact, so people who missed it do not need a repeat performance, and the decision does not have to be relitigated because nobody can remember the reasoning.
That is the whole idea behind Craqly’s Auto Notes: the notes, decisions and action items get written while the meeting happens, so nobody has to choose between participating and taking minutes. If the meeting is worth its cost, it is worth capturing properly.
Frequently asked questions
How do you calculate the cost of a meeting?
Take each attendee’s annual salary, multiply by a loaded-cost factor of roughly 1.3 to cover payroll taxes, benefits and equipment, and divide by the hours in a working year — 2,080 if you use the conventional 52 weeks of 40 hours. That gives an hourly cost per person. Multiply by the length of the meeting, add up the room, and multiply again by how often it recurs. The meeting cost calculator does all of it and shows its workings, including the assumptions, so you can argue with them.
Where does the phrase “this meeting could have been an email” come from?
It spread as office shorthand rather than from any single source, and it long predates remote work — it simply got much louder when a generation of status meetings moved onto video and people started counting the hours. It endures because it names a specific failure: using a synchronous format to distribute information that was already written down, or could have been.
Is it rude to decline a meeting?
Declining is not the interesting part; replacing is. “I don’t think I’ll add much here — could you send the notes and flag me if a decision needs me?” costs nothing socially and gives the organiser useful information. If you are the organiser, saying “I’ve cut this to three people, everyone else gets the summary” is one of the highest-leverage things you can do with an invite.
How many people is too many for a meeting?
There is no universal number, but the useful signal is how many people speak. Past about five attendees, most rooms have a majority who never contribute, and past eight a discussion generally turns into a presentation with a question at the end. If you want a rule of thumb rather than a law: if more than half the room has not spoken by the halfway mark, it is a broadcast.
What should replace a recurring status meeting?
A written update on the same cadence, with a standing deadline for objections and a named owner for each item. Keep a short synchronous slot if the team wants one, but make attendance optional and make the document the source of truth. The failure mode to avoid is running both, where the document is a summary of the meeting rather than a replacement for it.
