The Meeting That Should Have Been an Email: Attention as a Shared Resource

What do we owe one another when we claim a portion of their waking hours? And is the meeting, that most familiar of institutional rituals, always the most honest way to honour that debt, or does it sometimes spend the attention of others rather carelessly, in the way one might spend borrowed money without quite noticing the weight of the obligation?

Attention is not an abstract resource. It is embodied, finite, and subject to fatigue. Every hour a person spends in a meeting room is an hour subtracted from the store of focused energy they carried into the day. Cognitive scientists have long understood that sustained attention depletes, that the mind does not simply switch between tasks without cost, and that the particular kind of attention demanded in a group setting, alert, responsive, socially calibrated, is among the most taxing of all. When we call a meeting, we are not merely requesting the presence of bodies in chairs; we are drawing on something genuinely valuable and genuinely exhaustible.

Yet the culture of organisational life has rarely treated meeting time as the scarce good it is. Calendars fill with standing gatherings that nobody has paused to question, recurring slots that were once useful and have since calcified into habit. People arrive having read nothing in preparation, sit through updates that could have been communicated in three well-constructed paragraphs, and depart no clearer than when they entered. The meeting has, in many workplaces, become a kind of performance of collaboration rather than collaboration itself. It signals busyness, signals inclusion, signals that decisions are being made collectively, even when the actual decision was reached by one person before anyone sat down.

There is an ethical dimension here that deserves more explicit attention than it usually receives. When we summon ten people to a meeting that lasts an hour, we are spending ten hours of human attention in aggregate. If five of those people needed to be there and five did not, we have squandered five hours that belonged, in some meaningful sense, to the people who held them. Treating the time of colleagues as a commons that can be drawn upon at will, without careful deliberation about whether the expenditure is justified, is a form of disrespect, even when it is entirely unconscious and well-intentioned.

The written word offers a different kind of transaction. An email, a memo, a brief document, these make demands too, but they are demands the reader can meet on their own terms, in the gaps of their day, at the pace suited to their current capacity. The writer is forced to organise thought in advance, to resolve ambiguity before it reaches the reader, to commit to a position rather than thinking aloud at collective expense. There is a discipline in writing that the spoken meeting does not always impose. One cannot meander indefinitely when one must commit words to a page; the very act of writing clarifies the writer and, in doing so, respects the reader.

This is not an argument for the abolition of meetings, and it would be a mistake to read it as such. There are moments of genuine value that only a meeting can supply. The spontaneous connection between two ideas spoken by two different people; the trust built by sitting in a room and working through difficulty together; the subtle calibration of tone and commitment that only a face-to-face exchange can produce; these things are real, and they matter. The question is not whether meetings have value but whether every meeting called has earned that value, whether the particular gathering convened on any given afternoon could only have achieved its purpose through the spoken, synchronous assembly of minds.

One might consider, too, the power dynamics at play. Those who call meetings are rarely those with least power in a room. The meeting, as an institution, is largely controlled by people whose own time is less visibly constrained, people who may feel the cost of others less acutely precisely because structural privilege insulates them from feedback about that cost. When a senior figure calls a meeting, junior colleagues rarely refuse. The asymmetry means that the attention being spent is disproportionately that of people who had least say in the decision. This is not a comfortable observation, but it is a necessary one.

Respecting collective attention requires something close to a deliberate practice. It means asking, before sending any calendar invitation, whether the purpose of the gathering is genuinely interactive, whether the outcome requires real-time exchange, whether a well-written document followed by targeted questions would serve just as well or better. It means keeping meeting groups small enough that everyone present is genuinely needed. It means preparing sufficiently that the thinking has already been done before bodies are assembled, so that the meeting is the culmination of thought rather than the beginning of it. And it means ending when the purpose is achieved rather than filling the slot because the slot was booked.

There is a deeper philosophical undercurrent here, one that connects to how we understand respect for persons in collaborative life. The philosopher who argued that treating persons as ends rather than merely as means was articulating something that applies with quiet force to the practice of meeting. To call someone into a room for reasons that primarily serve the caller, to use the assembled attention of colleagues as a backdrop for thinking one could have done alone, is to treat them as means. To ask only of others the attention that is genuinely necessary, having first done the work of making ones own thinking clear, is something closer to treating them as ends.

So perhaps the question we should carry into every week of professional life is this: when we gather people together, are we doing so because something irreplaceable can only happen in that shared space, or are we simply reaching for the familiar convenience of the meeting because writing clearly is harder, because preparation takes time, because silence is uncomfortable? What would it mean, in practice, to treat the attention of others as the genuinely precious thing it is?