A great email is worth 3 meetings and a nap

Most meetings are just group procrastination in disguise.

Think about the last “quick sync” you attended. Someone shared their screen. Someone else asked a question that could’ve been a reply. Thirty minutes passed. Nothing was decided that couldn’t have been written in three sentences.

But a well-written email? That’s progress… with a “send” button.

You don’t need another calendar invite. You need clarity.

When done right, one email can move a project forward faster than a dozen meetings. And you’ll still have time left to make a sandwich — this is a metaphor, I’ll get to it.

It respects time

We’re all drowning in Zooms. Nobody wants another 30-minute “quick sync” that could’ve been an email thread.

Here’s the thing nobody says out loud: most meetings aren’t called because they’re necessary. They’re called because the person scheduling them didn’t want to do the work of writing clearly.

Writing forces you to think before you speak. A meeting lets you figure it out live — at everyone else’s expense.

A good email says what it needs to. Quickly. Clearly. It shows up in someone’s inbox when they’re ready for it, not when the calendar says so.

Less “can you hop on a call?” More “here’s everything you need.”

It makes you sound smarter

There’s a version of you that fires off a message the moment a thought lands. And there’s a version that sits with it. Reads it back. Removes the sentence that’s really just venting. Then sends.

The second version sounds like someone who knows what they’re doing.

You asked: “what do they really need to know?” Then deleted everything else. That discipline — that editing — is what gets noticed. Not the length. Not the formatting. The clarity.

And you didn’t say “per my last email” like a passive-aggressive spreadsheet.

You took the time to think. Rewrite. Add structure. Remove fluff.

It drives action

Most emails fail not because of tone — but because of structure. The ask is buried in paragraph three. The context is missing. The subject line says “update” and nothing else.

A good email has a job. It walks in, does the thing, and leaves.

A subject line with intent.
Context in two sentences.
Bullet points with facts.
A single ask — not twelve.

When someone reads it and knows exactly what to do next, that’s the email working. No follow-up call needed. No “just checking if you saw this.” Just a reply that moves things forward.

You don’t need five people to align in real time. You just need to spell it out clearly.

Back to the metaphor.

Emails are like burritos. 🌯 They only work if everything’s wrapped neatly. The rice. The beans. The salsa. All in the right order, all contained, all going in the same direction.

Messy ones fall apart in your hands and leave you wondering what just happened. Tidy ones make people say, “damn, that was good.” And the person who made it? They didn’t need a committee meeting to figure out the filling.

So be the burrito artist. Not the soup slinger.

Fewer meetings. More thinking. Better burritos.

What’s the most effective email you’ve ever written?

Or the one that made you go: “that should’ve been an email”?

📌 A shorter version of this post was originally published on my Linkedin Newsletter “Continuous Improvement”