The ‘Thoughtless’ Meeting Habit Your Team Hates

Your colleague asks you a reasonable question.

You could take five minutes to write a cogent reply. You have everything you need to reply well. Multiple teammates would benefit from reading your reply. But instead, you say, “Let’s hop on a call.”

When you say this, sometimes what you really mean is: “I don’t want to do the work of clarifying my own thinking. And I believe it’ll be easier to think out loud and answer in a live conversation.”

In turn, here’s what your colleagues or team members may think — even if they won’t say it to your face: If you don’t want to invest a few minutes to write a reply to a reasonable question, why should I listen (with no 1.5x button) as you meander in real time? GTFO.

Related: What Are You Wasting Your Business Time On?

At this point, you might be thinking: Wait, are you saying I should never do calls?

Not at all. There are plenty of good reasons to hop on a call — like to brainstorm, discuss ideas, collaborate, gather information, convey a message where your tone of voice matters, or get your recipients’ reaction in real time. And if the topic might lead to dozens of back-and-forth messages and confusion in writing, of course you should hop on a quick call instead.

The problem isn’t calls. The problem is defaulting to calls. Leaders often assume that “just hopping on a call” is the fastest solution, when it often isn’t.

Here is a better way.

Two ways to reply

Someone asks you a question. You could do one of two things:

Option A

• You take 10 minutes todraft a useful reply.

• Your audience takes a few minutes to read; one person asks a follow-up question, but everyone is otherwise satisfied.

• You move forward.

This takes 20 minutes total. It might feel like more work upfront, but the investment pays off.

Option B

• You aren’t sure how to explain your idea, but you think it’ll be easier to explain on a call.

• You ask Joe and Sue to hop on a call.

• You, Joe, and Sue hop on a call for 30 minutes. Now this is 1.5 man-hours spread across three people. And most of that time was you figuring out how to explain what you wanted to say, with too much backstory and the wrong type of detail.

• At the end of the meeting, one of you still needs to draft an answer for the rest of your team to read.

This takes two hours. You avoided thinking upfront, so you had to “pay” for this (with interest) later through multiple back-and-forth emails to clarify your point.

You might have saved yourself a bit of time upfront, but net-net it took more time for everyone else. This is selfish. Do not be selfish.

Now here’s the kicker: The real cost isn’t only about time. It’s also about how you are perceived.

Related: How Leaders Can Avoid Over-Communicating in the Workplace (and Why They Should)

How power dynamics come into play

As a leader, you might default to hopping on a call so you can quickly share your thoughts out loud.

This makes sense. You are genuinely time-constrained, and more importantly, you can “get away with” thinking out loud while others listen. Even if you ramble, you are less likely to be punished for it.

But there’s a cost to this.

If you force your direct reports and broader team to listen to verbal vomit, they might think you are scatterbrained. They might wonder: Does our leader know what they’re doing? We asked a simple question, and we can’t get a straightforward answer.

This can negatively impact their perception of you. Or they might avoid asking you questions at all, for fear of losing time to the follow-up call. All of this could have been avoided with a simple, coherent reply.

Related: 7 Proven Ways to Reduce Wasted Time in Your Daily Life

Common excuses you should stop using

If you’re guilty of initiating too many calls, you may have some excuses for it. Maybe you’re thinking about those excuses now. So let’s address them.

Here are the most common ones:

Excuse #1: “I’m not a good writer.”

Many people feel this way, so they default to calls because it’s a more forgiving medium. In writing, it’s obvious if you are not articulating your ideas well. In speaking, there’s more leeway.

But there’s a problem: When you default to speaking instead of writing, you often push off the work of thinking. You instead decide to think at the same time as you speak, and you end up sharing half-baked thoughts out loud.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a bad writer. Your thinking must happen sometime — ideally either before you answer in writing (Slack, email), or before you answer on a call. As an entrepreneur and leader, you are paid for your good judgment. You cannot escape the work of thinking.

Excuse #2: “But we need to discuss this.”

That’s fair. But are you truly discussing? Or are you just formulating your answer in real time?

Many times, when we say we want to hop on a call, there might be a subconscious element of worry: “I don’t want to say something and be wrong. I’d rather discuss it in the safety of a group setting, where no one in particular is accountable, and we all share ideas.”

This is a valid concern. The solution, though, isn’t to hop on a call. The solution is to answer accurately. Don’t overstate your confidence. Don’t present a hypothesis as if it’s a fact.

You can speak both confidently and accurately. One of my go-to phrases for doing this is to say: “My initial thinking is X, because Y.”

Excuse #3: “I don’t want to force my team to read a long Slack message.”

I teach an executive communications course, and my students often ask me: “This Slack message seems long. Would it be better to share this on a call?”

This is not a good reason to hop on a call.

Being concise is not about simply being brief. Just because a message has more than a few lines of text, that does not mean it is “too long.” No messages are inherently “too short” or “too long”; it depends on the context of what’s being discussed and the quality of the content.

Even if an answer is really “too long” for Slack, here’s something most people don’t realize: It can take more time for your recipient to listen than to read.

People can read at their own pace. They can reread key parts to boost their comprehension. But they can only listen to you at one pace. So when you speak, your recipient actually has less control — and would likely benefit more from a written message.

Excuse #4: “Our company culture defaults to meeting live. I like this and so do my colleagues.”

This may be true, and that’s OK. But please ask yourself: Is this really true? Do your colleagues actually like calls as much as you do?

Related: Entrepreneurs Are Losing 1.5 Hours Every Day to ‘Wasted Time’ — and a New Productivity Killer Is Emerging. Are You Guilty of It?

What you can do today

The next time someone asks you a reasonable question in Slack, and your urge is to say, “Let’s hop on a call,” stop and ask yourself:

• If I think about this for a few moments, might I come up with a useful answer?

• What can I share in writing that will create a better baseline for a live conversation, if we choose to have one?

• If I’m not sure what to say in writing, what would I say on a live call? Could I say that now in writing?

The goal is to unpack why we might default to a call, and to be intellectually honest with ourselves about whether it’s truly worth everyone’s time.

Don’t do things as a thoughtless default. Instead, take the most effective approach. So before you schedule another call, just take a beat to consider what you have to say. Then find the best way (for everyone!) to say it.

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