100% agree. Most of the time, when I hear "this could have been an email," it's from someone with a track record of not reading (or writing and responding to) emails meaningfully.

Totally... I've been through this cycle more times than I'd care to count:

"What would be a good day next week to block off time to review this?"

"We don't need a meeting for this, I can get to it <whenever>"

"That's an excellent point, and I tend to agree. Nevertheless, this has been hanging out there for several weeks now. We can schedule the meeting now, and if it ends up getting done before then, it can be canceled.".

I think not reading or responding to e-mails is largely (from my experience) indicative of more fundamental communication problems in the company/group.

The first problem is e-mail fatigue. Many groups have ridiculous amounts of automated e-mails that amount to line noise. The information in them is rarely actionable and certainly never so critical it needs to be read by everyone immediately. "Everything is OK" alarms are fucking infuriating. It's very easy to miss the super highly critical e-mail from a manager that's just a lazily forwarded e-mail from the automated systems. The "Have you seen this?" with the entire contents of the line noise e-mail from the automated system.

Second is people, especially middle management, that for some reason assume e-mail is a real-time communication medium. They send an e-mail and expect the recipients to drop everything to respond to it. Simultaneously the people actually doing work are actually working and not checking their e-mail every nanosecond to see if they need to drop their actual work to explain their actual work to management. So then the middle management sends a cascade of instant messages and schedules meetings to get the people doing actual work to drop everything to explain their actual work. These meetings will inevitably contain complaints about not getting work done.

It's now even worse with AI in the middle. Instead of using LLMs to write easy to scan and digest bullet point e-mails they're used to expand bullet points into useless novellas.

My solutions to these problems are thus:

1. RSS - Automated systems should just emit RSS feeds with their normal status with separate feeds for exceptional conditions. Only in those actual "machine on fire" conditions are e-mails sent by such systems. Parties interested in constant updates just watch their feed reader and everyone has a single source of truth for event logs from the automated systems.

2. Automated systems should just file tickets automatically so everyone involved has a single source of truth and can all collaborate in one place. Even better if the ticket/bug tracker supports RSS because it becomes dead simple for anyone to follow feeds they're interested in and even set up system notifications for new issues.

3. Company/group wide e-mail policies that constantly remind everyone it's not a real-time medium and that filling everyone's inbox with noise is not effective communication. This can be enforced with automated delivery delays guaranteeing e-mail won't be immediately delivered as a safeguard against people using it instead of actual real-time channels.

4. Verbose e-mails are also rarely effective communication and shared LLM prompts that make e-mails shorter and clearer would also help.

Removing most of the noise from e-mail makes it more effective and can make it an actual communication medium. If e-mail becomes effective communication far less of everyone's limited lives needs to be spent zoning out in meetings where their only purpose is to "give a status update".

Back in the days of paper memos the literal cost and effort required to send them required the sender to really think about what they were trying to communicate and how to say it best. Because e-mail is essentially free it is widely abused since so little thought needs to go into its composition and delivery.