Dear Epicurus: My Meeting Could Have Been An Email

My Meeting Could Have Been An Email

Epicurus Replies

Epicurus, Greek philosopher and founder of the Garden school (341 to 270 BC)

Dear Synced Out in Syracuse,

Friend, I built a whole philosophy around the idea that most of what people chase brings no real pleasure at all, just noise dressed up as necessity. Your Tuesday meeting is noise with a calendar invite attached. The question is not whether you can survive it. The question is why anyone thought it was worth seven people's mornings in the first place.

What you are describing is a group of people performing busyness at each other because no one trusts that the work is happening unless it is narrated aloud. That is not communication, it is anxiety wearing a lanyard. As I wrote, Self-sufficiency is the greatest of all riches. The organization that needs constant verbal reassurance has already admitted it does not trust its own people or its own systems.

I am not telling you to skip the meeting and face a reckoning. I am telling you to shrink it. Write your ninety seconds down in two lines and send them before ten. Ask your manager if the meeting can become optional for anyone with nothing new to report. Most unnecessary gatherings do not survive the question does anyone actually need this, asked plainly and without apology.

This week, send your status update in writing the night before, and see if the meeting shortens itself naturally once everyone already knows what you did. A second meeting to discuss the first meeting is not diligence, it is a man drowning and asking for a bigger spoon. Go tend something that actually needs tending.

— Epicurus

Epicurus was a Greek philosopher who founded a school known as the Garden, where he taught that a simple life among friends, free of unnecessary fear and desire, was the path to genuine pleasure and peace. Contrary to his later reputation for indulgence, he actually preferred bread, water, and conversation to lavish excess. His surviving works include the Letter to Menoeceus and a set of short maxims called the Principal Doctrines and Vatican Sayings. He remains a touchstone for anyone arguing that less really can be more.

Try This Today

Before your next status meeting, write your update in two sentences and send it ahead of time. Then ask the group, in writing, whether anyone has an item that genuinely requires live discussion. If the answer is no, propose cutting the meeting short or making it optional. Watch how quickly a calendar clears when nobody has to perform diligence out loud.

Your Turn

Which recurring meeting on your calendar exists mainly to make someone else feel reassured, and what would happen if it simply did not?