Meetings
Do you actually need a meeting?
The honest answer is often no, but the alternative is not always writing. Both failure modes cost real time, and they are worth telling apart.
The test
Ask what has to be true at the end that is not true now. If the answer is 'everyone knows X', that is a message. If it is 'we have picked between X and Y and the people who disagree have been heard', that is a meeting.
The distinguishing feature is disagreement. Meetings are expensive machinery for resolving it in real time, and using them for anything else is paying for the machinery without using it.
What belongs in writing
Status, progress, numbers, anything where the recipient's response is 'noted'. Writing is faster to produce than a meeting is to attend, it is searchable afterwards, and it does not require everyone to be free at the same moment.
The objection is that people do not read. Often true, and usually a symptom rather than a cause: they do not read because most of what is sent did not need to reach them. Sending less improves the read rate more than holding a meeting does.
Settle the time without the thread
Propose a few slots, share one link, and let the group vote. Guests never sign up.
Two cases where the meeting is cheaper
First, when the thread has already gone four rounds. At that point the disagreement is not about information, and another written round will not close it. Twenty minutes of synchronous time is cheaper than another day of messages.
Second, when something is uncomfortable. Bad news, a decision that disadvantages someone, anything where tone carries meaning. Writing strips tone out, and the reader supplies their own, usually worse than you intended.
The middle option people skip
There is a third thing between a meeting and a message, and it is a written decision with a deadline: here is the proposal, here is the reasoning, object by Thursday or it goes ahead.
It resolves most things that would otherwise have become a meeting, because most people do not object — they just want the chance to. Giving them the chance in writing costs you nothing and costs them a minute.
If you do hold it
Say what it decides in the invite, keep it to the people who decide or contribute, and send the outcome to everyone else. That is the version that justifies the cost.
And if you get to the end and nothing was decided, that is worth naming rather than booking a follow-up on reflex. A meeting that did not decide anything usually had the wrong people in it or the wrong question in front of them.