Tired of meetings? Free tools you can use to explain ANYTHING without having to make a call.

You’ve already probably seen the phrase “that meeting could have been an email” somewhere. Chances are that you even thought or even written down that phrase yourself many times, after many frustrating meetings or calls, after many meaningless Zoom calls, that ate up hours of your life. Most of the time, for tiny things that could have easily been written down.

Or if you are socially unfiltered like me, you probably even spelled that out loud while in a meeting — “why are we meeting to talk about this? This could have been a Slack message or an email”.

There is also the aggravating factor that you may or may not identify with: I can’t express myself clearly when I talk and it’s hard for me to pay attention when others are speaking, because I’m a visual person, I work at my full potential when using text and images (I’m also happier when I don’t have to be part of meetings or calls).

Note: This article is also available in video (but in Portuguese).

Is it possible to do “that meeting could have been an email” in practice?

How to explain, or show, or solve things that can’t simply be expressed by text?

I have something to tell you, with the tools and the process that I’ll show you in this article, it’s possible to explain anything by asynchronous* channels (email, text, chat, etc.), without having to resort to synchronous* channels (meetings, video calls or the worse thing that can happen in someone’s day: a phone call).

This process also empowers you to ask questions online effectively.

Without further ado, let’s get straight to the point (as opposed to meetings).

In this context, asynchronous refers to not blocking people’s time and not interrupting whatever task they are currently doing. Likewise, synchronous refers to grabbing people’s time and attention and interrupting their current tasks.

The Tools