9 reasons every meeting could be a 3-line email, drunken kruger style

every meeting could have been a three line email. i decided this at 2 am, again, palm flat on a piece of office furniture i overpaid for, and a strong sense that i had cracked the human condition. the famous psychology effect was watching me from the corner of the room. it had a clipboard. it took notes.

this is a friday at 12:38pm. carla is in an all-hands on the third floor and has been for seventy minutes, with no sign she’ll be out before lunch. that gives me, on this desk, about an hour to defend a hot take a sober person would have walked back by sunrise. the hot take is HT12. the people who searched for “drunken kruger effect” are, indeed, a little drunken, and so was i when i wrote the first draft of this. tenderly. without judgment. the search bar is honest in a way bars usually aren’t.

i’m going to be specific, because i owe the reader specifics. nine meetings. nine reasons. one chart, the famous one, hovering politely over the whole thing.

i wrote a longer thing about the underlying study at my main investigation into the dunning-kruger effect, drafted at this same desk and at greater length than this. that piece is sober. this one is honest. they’re cousins.

1. intro pulpit, the hot take, plainly

2. items 1-3, meetings i sat through

these three are mine. i was there. i can describe the carpet.

1. the kickoff that was a name change. a man stood up, walked to a whiteboard, and explained that “phase one” was now “phase 0.5.” that was the meeting. that was the entire piece of news. forty-two minutes. the man was sincere. the man had a chart. the man, on the chart, was on a small confident peak. an email reading “phase one is now phase 0.5, please update your decks, thanks” would have done the same work and given me back, by the count i keep running, a pre-lunch coffee.

2. the recurring weekly nobody owns. this one is on the calendar every monday at 10. nobody scheduled it. nobody can cancel it. the original organizer left the company in 2022. the meeting persists, like a barnacle, and we sit in it and stare at each other for thirty minutes while the standing desk i’m sitting at hums faintly. a 3-line email would say: “no updates this week. thanks. respond if you object.” nobody would object. the meeting would be three lines. the standing desk would still hum. that’s progress.

3. the alignment about the alignment. a meeting was held, and i attended, to determine whether next week’s meeting was necessary. the meeting that determined this lasted longer than the meeting it was determining. the conclusion, reached at minute thirty-eight, was that yes, the next meeting was necessary, in order to align. nobody said the word “drunken” out loud. the room said it without needing the word.

EVERY. MEETING. COULD BE. A 3-LINE EMAIL.

3. items 4-6, meetings carla sat through for me

these three i did not attend. carla did. she was kind enough to relay them at her desk, in a hushed voice, between calendar invites.

4. the all-hands about the new espresso machine. they brought in a vendor. there were slides. the slides had photographs of milk. carla, who has more patience than i deserve as a colleague, said the part about temperature curves was actually interesting. then they spent eighteen minutes on a logo. an email reading “new machine arrives tuesday, here’s the link to the manual” would have done it. the logo would have lived in the manual. carla agreed but had to go to another meeting.

5. the q-something review nobody understood. carla took the meeting because i was, on paper, “out of office” (i was at this desk). the meeting was about a metric called “engagement velocity,” a term that, at home that evening, i tried to define out loud and couldn’t. carla said even the man presenting it didn’t seem to have the definition. he had confidence. he had a colored chart. the chart was wrong but the colors were tasteful. peak mount stupid, well-decorated.

6. the planning of the planning. a meeting was held to plan the meeting that would plan the project that would, eventually, plan the launch. carla left at minute forty with a slight headache and a copy of the deck. the deck had a cover slide. the cover slide had a sub-cover slide. an email reading “we’re planning to launch in october, here are the three open questions” would have, in three lines, replaced the entire cathedral.

4. items 7-9, the 2 am revelation that confirmed the drunken kruger effect

this is where the post earns its slug. these three i confirmed at 2 am, at home, with the lamp on and the laptop tilted at an apologetic angle. there was a glass involved. it was not water. that’s the kindest way to say it.

7. the meeting that became an aphorism. at 2 am i typed the phrase “every meeting could be a 3-line email” into a search bar and the autocomplete finished it for me, which means somebody before me had already done the same. i was not the first idiot. that was, in its way, comforting. it was also, on a sober reading, evidence of the very chart we are not naming yet. one search later i fat-fingered “drunken kruger effect” and the internet, kindly, sent me back to the same study. the study did not laugh. the study has seen worse.

8. the meeting i scheduled myself, which is the worst kind. i once put a 30-minute hold on five colleagues’ calendars to “discuss” a thing that, by minute six, i realized could have been a slack message. i was, in that moment, the antagonist of my own post. i was the man on the peak. i had a chart. the chart was: “i had a thought.” i kept the meeting going for the full thirty minutes because canceling it felt worse than enduring it, which is a lesson about meetings, drunkenness, and the entire human enterprise. “the big lebowski” understands this energy better than i do. the dude would not have scheduled the meeting. the dude knew.

9. the meeting that confirmed my own hypothesis to me. the next morning, carla and i had a hallway exchange. i said, “i think every meeting could be a 3-line email.” she said, “yeah.” that was a 7-word meeting. it landed harder than any forty-minute review i’ve sat through this year. the chart, watching from the corner of the room with its clipboard, made a small approving check.

5. closing pulpit, i rest my case

here is where we end up. drunken or sober, the lesson is the same: most meetings are an email. most emails are three lines. most three lines are a sentence. and most sentences, on close inspection, are something somebody could have texted from the corner of a bar, on the third beer, with a 2 am revelation already loaded in the chamber.

i have made all the searches. i have run all the typos. i have sat in meetings i scheduled myself and watched my own confidence wear off in real time. i’m not the exception. i’m the example. i’m exhibit a, with a typo.

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