There are two things everybody in business (say they) hate: meetings and email. So the past few years have seen a great many startups that try to re-invent, revolutionize, and strategerize the crap out of meetings and email. However, recently we seem to have come to a disappointing realization: meetings and email are the worst ways to get things done, except for all the other ways.

In Meet Is Murder Virginia Heffernan goes deep on the topic of meetings: why we hate them, what people have tried differently, and how we just can’t seem to quit them. Her resigned conclusion hints at what really might be the source of our meeting hatred:

What’s so bad about meetings, after all? At bottom, they are nothing but time with your fellows. Which suggests that hating meetings might be akin to hating traffic, families or parties—just another way to express our deep ambivalence about that hard fact of existence: other people.

Meanwhile, in Slack, I’m Breaking Up with You Samuel Hulick shares his dismay with Silicon Valley’s latest darling company. These kinds of articles are inevitable at this point—we’re almost certainly approaching 6 PM SVT (Silicon Valley Time) for Slack. Anyway, Samuel wrote a break-up letter to Slack, but at times it reads more like a subtle “Please come back!” letter to email. For example:

While it’s true that email was (and, despite your valiant efforts, still very much is) a barely-manageable firehose of to-do list items controlled by strangers, one of the few things that it did have going for it was that at least everything was in one place.

And this:

When work gets done over email, there’s a general expectation of a response buffer of at least an hour or two. In you, though, people can convene and decide on anything at any time.

Also this:

When I started feeling like our relationship was getting to be just a little too much, I decided to take a few days off. That was never a problem when I was with email—I’d just fire up a vacation autoresponder and be on my merry way.

I’ve always liked email (which, sorry, I know, is like a Portlander saying “Oh you just found out about Kale? I’ve been eating Kale all my life!”), and felt that the bigger problem is not the system but the way we deal with it. I tried Google Inbox and that Mailbox thing that Dropbox bought and shut down, but I could just never get into a groove with a system that tries to sort my email for me. Instead I just do something that works really well for me: I read every email, and file each message in the appropriate place when I’m done dealing with it. That’s it.

I’m also not as against meetings as I used to be. My rules there are equally simple: always walk out of a meeting with an artifact. This could be a whiteboard sketch or a note about a thing you need to go research—it doesn’t really matter. Just walk out of there with something. Meetings should focus on facilitating the things that meetings are good at: collective thinking. Meetings that energize me are the ones where most people are standing, working together on a common goal. From customer journey workshops to design studio sessions to analyzing usability testing results, there are plenty of useful ways to spend our times in meetings. That’s my only criterium for a good meeting: make progress.

These guidelines are probably way too simple for the majority of businesses and people. But I do think that when we try to “reinvent” meetings and email we’re trying to solve a people problem with technology, and that’s just never going to work. Technology can help, for sure, but at its core we need to figure out why we hate email and meetings, and then fix that first. And I think the main problem with meetings and email is that we don’t spend enough time taking personal responsibility to make them more effective. Until we stop trying to offload our personal responsibility on the shoulders of technology, nothing will change.