Google Calendar meeting rationale

There’s a line that regularly circulates in the tech world: “This meeting could have been an email”. The sentiment is obvious. People thoughtlessly book calls in the corporate world without considering whether or not they could have been conducted asynchronously. I’m going to restrain myself from ranting about the performative aspects of corporate culture, but suffice it to say that a lot of meetings are theater.

This got me thinking. When you’re booking an email, what if you had to record an explanation or pitch as to why the meeting needs to happen? On one hand, you might think it’d be a huge time saver. However, this could backfire and create content that needs to be consumed ahead of a meeting, doubling the distraction and time wasted on a call that may feel pointless.

This is a bad solution to a real problem. There could be a lighter weight solution to this (voting mechanism, brief description or “pitch”, etc.). I’m not sure what the right solution is but I do know it’d be nice if this existed.

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