“could have been an email” — battle cry for the bandwidth-battered
kill the meeting. save the quarter.
cold open
five words that vaporise agendas faster than a Wi-Fi dropout.
murmur them in a 16-person Zoom—watch calendars empty like a liquidity run.
the anatomy of attention theft
“could” – possibility, politely loaded.
“have been” – retroactive indictment.
“an email” – the cheapest transport for overvalued information.
meetings: where minutes are kept and hours are lost.
downtime deficit vs. calendar colonialism
every sync costs salary, sanity and server space. yet managers hoard airtime like middle
children hoard Lego bricks. the phrase is a red card—flagging any huddle that confuses
presence with progress.
$37 bn – annual cost of unnecessary meetings (US)
21 % – knowledge-worker time spent “in meetings about meetings”
3 – emails that could replace the average 30-min status call
mute-button protocol
drop the line in the first five minutes. if organizers pivot to bullet points, you’ve saved
an hour. if they double down on the slide deck, exit strategy = “connection issues.”
we don’t decline invites.
we default to async.
footnote on asynchronous alpha
inboxes scale; conference rooms don’t. respect the compounding value of uninterrupted
cognition—your P&L will thank you.
closer
say it once. let dead air confess its guilt. then decide whether to unmute—
or archive the entire call in one sentence.