27 Emails. One 3-Minute Conversation. Guess Which One Solved the Problem?

It starts with an innocent email.

“Can you clarify?”

Someone replies. Someone else hits Reply All. A third person adds their manager “for visibility.” Apparently, we now need witnesses.

Before long, twelve people are involved, the original question is buried below six signatures, and somebody has written, “Per my previous email.” Things are getting tense.

Twenty-seven emails later, someone makes a radical suggestion.

“Can we just talk?”

Three minutes later, the issue is solved.

Where do we submit a request to get the rest of that morning back?

We have never had more ways to communicate. Email, Teams, Slack, text, Zoom and now AI keep us connected throughout the day. Yet sometimes a simple conversation feels harder to arrange than a family vacation.

A study published this year in Perspectives on Psychological Science caught my attention. Researchers examined estimates of daily spoken words from 2,197 people across 22 studies conducted between 2005 and 2019. They found an estimated 28% decline in the number of words people spoke each day.

The study wasn’t about workplaces, and it doesn’t establish that technology caused the decline. But it made me think about how much of our day we spend exchanging messages and how little of it we sometimes spend having an actual conversation.

We are communicating all day. I’m not convinced that communication is helping us get things resolved.

When Communication Becomes Part of the Workload

Microsoft’s research found that the average worker receives 117 emails a day and 153 Teams messages every weekday. Nearly half of employees surveyed described their work as chaotic and fragmented.

And that’s before the meetings.

I define capacity as the time, attention and energy available for what’s important. Every email we read, thread we follow and notification we respond to takes a little piece of that capacity. Some messages deserve our attention. Others leave us wondering why we were included in the first place.

“For your awareness.”

Thank you. I am now aware of one more thing.

Work has to move between people and teams, especially in global and flexible organizations. But it’s worth asking whether all this communication is actually helping the work move forward.

Sometimes we create so much communication around the work that it becomes work of its own. We explain something, clarify the explanation, locate the attachment and then discover it was the wrong attachment.

Meanwhile, the important work is still waiting.

Fast Isn’t Always Efficient

Sending a message takes seconds. Resolving what’s in it can take considerably longer.

Tone is one reason. A brief response might mean someone is busy, typing on a phone or simply answering the question. The person receiving it may spend the next twenty minutes wondering whether they’ve offended someone.

“Fine.”

Is that fine? Or should I start updating my résumé?

A conversation gives us room to ask questions, listen and clear things up before our imaginations take over. It also helps us notice things a message can hide. Someone sounds exhausted. A colleague hesitates when we ask how the project is going. A question reveals that two people have been working from completely different assumptions.

An earlier study of more than 61,000 Microsoft employees found that the shift to firm-wide remote work in 2020 made collaboration networks more siloed, with fewer connections between groups. Communication also shifted toward more email and messaging and less real-time exchange.

That doesn’t mean the answer is more meetings. Please don’t take this as permission to turn every email into one. Our calendars have suffered enough.

It does mean we should be more intentional about choosing the form of communication that fits the situation. A quick update may need a message. A sensitive issue or confusing exchange may be resolved much more easily with a conversation.

Connection Deserves Some Capacity, Too

Some of the most valuable conversations I’ve had at work started with somebody saying, “Can I get your opinion on something?”

Those conversations rarely appear on a project plan, but they can uncover a problem, prevent a misunderstanding or produce an idea that saves hours of unnecessary work.

The same thing happens at home. We can exchange messages all day about groceries, appointments and who is picking up what, then realize we haven’t actually asked each other a real question.

There is a difference between coordinating dinner and enjoying it together.

Connection needs some of our time, attention and energy too. If every bit of our capacity goes to keeping up, relationships get whatever is left. On some days, there isn’t much.

Make Communication Earn Its Place

I am a huge believer in technology and AI. Used well, they can help us reclaim time and reduce unnecessary work. What interests me is what we choose to do with the capacity they give us back.

I’d like to see more of that capacity going toward thoughtful decisions, customer conversations, relationships and the work that really matters, rather than automatically filling it with more messages.

So this week, try a little subtraction.

Before adding someone to an email chain, ask whether they need to be there. If you’re about to send another long explanation, consider whether a brief conversation would resolve things faster. And before interrupting someone, think about whether the message really needs an immediate response.

Then pay attention to what happens. You may find there are fewer messages to manage, decisions become clearer and everyone has a little more room to focus.

Busy is not a strategy. Neither is Reply All.

Sometimes the best thing we can do for our capacity, and our connection, is surprisingly simple:

“Can we just talk?”