Let's talk about this article - what are your experiences from the time you'd worked at MS and Google?

Email and meetings are tools for information exchange. Like most tools, they can be applied well or misapplied. A SubZero refrigerator is one of the best in the world, but if the door is left open, it won't do a very good job of keeping its contents cold.

Email applied well carries valuable information, increases the perceived value of the originator, and in the case of multiple recipients, the shared information adds to the feeling of a team.

Email misapplied carries little valuable information, wastes time of the recipients, and degrades the perceived value of the originator.

Meetings, as a venue for real-time information exchange, can also be well-managed or misapplied.

Patrick Lencioni, in Death By Meeting (amazon.com) writes about how meetings are typically mismanaged, which explains why we often roll our eyes or groan out loud at the thought of yet another meeting. But Mr. Lencioni also writes how to manage them well.

So, I agree with the original statement that "email and meetings are not work" if they are misapplied. But, when well managed, with preparation and thought, both email and meetings can be excellent vehicles for good work.

Alan, I get your point. And there is a lot of data on how to make both of these work great for you. Question raised by Tom Tunguz, in my opinion, is whether or not we should focus on these tools, while we're apparently in the "new age" of communication.

I'm not so convinced that there is really a "new age" of communication.

If you abstract email as a tool, it's a non-realtime (time-shifted) communication tool between multiple recipients addressed using RFC822 addresses, with plain or rich-text, possibly including multi-media attachments, presented on either a native or web-based client, and possibly securely encrypted.

Compare that with Twitter: a web-based, non-realtime, limited plain text, communication tool between multiple recipients, addressed using Twitter-specific "handles", presented on either a native or web-based client.

So, what are the essential differences between Twitter and Email? distinct addressing "handles", limited text, and some simple text markup features?

As for meetings, many companies make do with less of them, coordinating communication with phone calls, IMs, and emails.

On the other hand, the social, in-person aspect and feel of a meeting is very hard to replace, even with a modern, high-res video-conferencing system.