A thirty-minute meeting with six people isn't thirty minutes, it's three hours of collective time, spent to deliver something that often could have been read in ninety seconds.
The habit worth building, as the person calling a meeting, is a quick test before it goes on anyone's calendar: is this meeting for making a decision together, working through something that genuinely needs real-time back-and-forth, or resolving disagreement that hasn't moved over email? If the honest answer is "no, I just need to tell people something," it's not a meeting. It's a message.
A recurring "status update" meeting where each person reports what they did that week, with no discussion, no decisions, and no disagreement to work through, just information moving one direction, from several people to one shared audience.
A planning session where three people with different constraints need to negotiate a shared timeline in real time, because the tradeoffs depend on questions that only surface through back-and-forth discussion.
The difference isn't the topic, it's whether the value comes from information moving, or from people actually working something out together. Status updates, FYIs, and one-directional announcements almost always belong in writing. Anything that requires genuine negotiation, working through ambiguity together, or reading a room's reaction in real time usually needs the meeting.
If nobody in the room needs to say anything back, it wasn't a meeting. It was an announcement wearing a calendar invite.
If you're on the receiving end of a meeting that seems like it should have been an email, raising that directly, respectfully, and ideally before it becomes a recurring habit, is worth doing. "Would it work to send this as an update instead, so we can save the time for things that need discussion?" is a reasonable question that most people appreciate being asked, even if they hadn't thought to ask it themselves.
One nuance worth holding onto: some meetings that look purely informational actually serve a real, if unstated, purpose, building team cohesion, giving quieter voices a regular chance to be heard, or simply keeping a distributed team feeling connected. Those aren't wasted meetings even without a decision on the agenda. The test isn't "did a decision get made", it's "did this need to happen live, or could it have happened just as well in writing."