Meetings and Communication

There's a joke that goes: how do you sell a deaf person chickens? You just ask really, really loudly. It's a bad joke. It's also, somehow, the default communication strategy in most workplaces. When we're not being understood, we repeat ourselves more emails, more meetings, more bold text. And still, everyone walks out of the room with a completely different idea of what just happened. More volume was never the answer.

We joke that “this meeting could’ve been an email,” but Charlie Munger would flip that logic on its head. In most organizations, the real failure mode isn’t too many meetings — it’s hiding work inside emails no one ever truly acknowledges. A good meeting, with a shared agenda and a visible workflow, creates something email never can: confirmation, context, and community. Reduce your emails by having better meetings. That’s how you start paying down process debt.

Collaboration in the modern workplace frequently falters before actual work starts. This week’s Process Debt story highlights how a simple profile update request turned into a 20-minute ordeal of password resets and confusion. It demonstrates how invisible process friction can disrupt even the simplest tasks, not due to individual failure, but because our systems impose unnecessary obstacles.

Forget the meme that “this meeting could’ve been an email.” The real fix is an acknowledgement cycle: tiny Looms, one change at a time, a weekly “did you do the thing?” scoreboard, and pull-based habits over notification spam. Transport information and confirm that it has become a shared understanding.

“More communication” is usually a polite way of saying “I’m not aligned.” Cut the volume, sharpen the purpose, and give people a reliable form so the message can finally land.

The modern workday is a carnival of micro-distractions—and our meetings invite them. One tiny habit flips the script: assign a rotating scribe to capture purpose, decisions, and 1–3 actions. Pair it with real time-boxes and separate “connection” from decision time to turn rituals back into results.

If you’ve ever set a New Year’s resolution you didn’t intend to keep, you already understand the hidden economics of meetings. We tell ourselves the ritual will make us better. Then we realize the ritual mostly made us feel better. I see it every January. We vow to be healthier, write daily, get organized. Then life sneezes on us during a flight and the plan stalls. That’s fine for personal goals, but in business we do the same thing with meetings. We schedule them to relieve

In this episode of the Process Debt Podcast, Chris and Toby unpack how over-communication and endless meetings have become the hidden drain on productivity. They explore why low-friction tools like Slack and Zoom make it easy to interrupt but hard to decide, and share practical ways to create healthier communication rituals that drive clarity instead of chaos.