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A Workshopr field guide · Coming soon

This Meeting Should Have Been An Email

How to identify what’s actually on your calendar, and what to do about it.

You took the screenshot. You sent the skull emoji. Then you attended all seven.

This book turns the complaint into an identification. Four checks, run on any invite in a fixed order, tell you what a meeting is for and whether it should exist at all. Inside are twenty-five species of meeting in five families, the pairs that look identical on an invite and need opposite treatment, and the scripts, verbatim, for declining, for cancelling something you own, and for writing the document that replaces the meeting.

It isn’t against meetings. The last part runs the whole thing backwards: the emails that should have been meetings.

Every invite has four field marks

  1. The verb. What has to be true at the end that isn’t true now?
  2. The authority. Can anyone in this room actually say yes?
  3. The dependency. Would anything be different if you reordered the speakers?
  4. The cost. Cheap and reversible: be wrong faster, in writing. Expensive or permanent: buy the room.
Coming soon

The book is not out yet. Leave your email and you get one message, the day it ships, and nothing else.

The reference

Five families, twenty-five species

Every species account has the same furniture, in the same order: field marks, the tell, verdict, script. You will not read it front to back. You will flip to it with a specific invite in front of you and a decision to make.

  1. The Broadcasts

    Information travelling one direction. Almost always a document, if the document is good enough to get read.

  2. The Decisions

    Before you spend an hour choosing something, spend five seconds establishing that somebody in the room can choose it.

  3. The Dependents

    If the room is where the thing gets made, buy the room, and buy more of it than feels comfortable.

  4. The Unwritables

    The meetings whose content cannot survive being written down, and whose agendas look emptiest. Shorten them. Do not kill them.

  5. The Impostors

    Meetings secretly doing a different job. Two of the five are load-bearing, and their invites look exactly like the three that aren’t.

The chapters

Contents

Part 1 is the only part you have to read in order, and it is short. Parts 2 and 3 are the reference, Part 4 is what to say, and Part 5 runs the whole thing backwards.

  1. Introduction The meeting you can’t name Seven blocks on a Tuesday, the screenshot you have taken, and why the complaint never changes anything.
  2. 1 Part 1 · The key The ratchet Meetings are easy to make and hard to unmake, like a subscription you stopped seeing four years ago.
  3. 2 Part 1 · The key The four field marks The four checks you run on any invite, in a fixed order, stopping when you have an answer.
  4. 3 Part 1 · The key The dependency test The one test that carries most of the weight: would anything change if you reordered the speakers?
  5. 4 Part 2 · The families Family I: The Broadcasts The status round-robin, the information broadcast and the context transfer.
  6. 5 Part 2 · The families Family II: The Decisions The real decision, the one nobody in the room can make, the one already made, and the recommendation meeting.
  7. 6 Part 2 · The families Family III: The Dependents The genuine disagreement, the working session, the negotiation, the escalation and the problem with no owner yet.
  8. 7 Part 2 · The families Family IV: The Unwritables What nobody will put in writing, feedback that must be said out loud, the repair, and the belonging ritual.
  9. 8 Part 2 · The families Family V: The Impostors Meetings that are really a deadline, the convener’s anxiety, theatre, an apology, or last week’s meeting again.
  10. 9 Part 3 · The pairs Status versus Blocker The most common misidentification in the book: nearly identical on the invite, opposite treatment.
  11. 10 Part 3 · The pairs Disagreement versus Misunderstanding The pair that decides whether a document can help you at all.
  12. 11 Part 3 · The pairs Brainstorm versus Vote Two meetings that get jammed into one hour and cancel each other out.
  13. 12 Part 4 · What to say Declining without becoming difficult The words for leaving a meeting you should not be in, without it becoming a conflict.
  14. 13 Part 4 · What to say Cancelling something you own Find out what it is actually doing first, then end it without saying something about the whole year.
  15. 14 Part 4 · What to say The document that replaces it Why “cook until done” fails, and how to write the thing well enough that the hour is really saved.
  16. 15 Part 5 · Backwards The emails that should have been meetings Sixty-one messages about Thanksgiving: the threads that needed a room, and how to spot them.
  17. 16 Close Name it first A field guide is read once and used for years. The four marks are the only part you have to carry.
  18. A Appendices The key, the index of species, the scripts, and a note on numbers The page to photograph, every species with its tell and verdict, every script collected, and why the famous meeting statistics are missing.

A complaint is not an identification. Name it first.

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