Picture the familiar video meeting: twelve rectangles, three cameras mysteriously “not working,” one person sharing a spreadsheet with enough columns to qualify as urban planning, and a colleague staring intensely at something just below the webcam.
Their eyebrows tighten. Their lips press together. They type four deliberate words, pause, reread them, and offer a grave little nod.
Clearly, something important is happening.
Perhaps a client has raised an urgent concern. Perhaps legal has appeared in the inbox. Perhaps the company’s future depends on whether “Thanks, noted” should include a period.
Or perhaps that person is moving an old promotional email into the trash while trying to look professionally occupied.
I call this expression the Important Email Face. It is the workplace cousin of pretending to check a text when you see someone you know at the supermarket. The goal is not necessarily to deceive anyone. It is to create a socially acceptable pocket of distance without openly announcing, “My attention has left this meeting and is currently wandering around unsupervised.”
That distinction matters. Pretending to read an important email is less about laziness than performance. It reveals a workplace culture in which visibly handling several demands can look more impressive than giving one task your full attention.
The Important Email Face exists because looking divided has somehow become evidence that you are in demand.
The Pose Everyone Recognizes but Nobody Names
The Important Email Face has a surprisingly precise choreography.
First comes the downward glance, usually aimed at a laptop or second monitor. Then a slight narrowing of the eyes, suggesting the message contains consequences. The performer may scroll once, but never casually. Casual scrolling is for recipes and apartment listings. Important scrolling must appear controlled.
Next comes typing. The typing cannot be too fast because that looks like chatting. It cannot be too slow because that looks like confusion. The ideal pace suggests careful diplomacy, as though every sentence is being reviewed by communications, legal, and a nervous vice president.
Finally, the performer reconnects with the meeting through a small nod or a thoughtful “Mm-hmm.” This is the audio equivalent of tapping a microphone to prove it is still on.
In an in-person meeting, the equipment matters. A laptop provides cover, but the screen must be angled with care. Too flat, and the person beside you can see that the “urgent correspondence” is actually a delivery notification. Too upright, and it becomes a wall between you and everyone else.
During a video call, the performance is easier but more dangerous. Nobody can see your screen, yet everyone can see your face. A sudden smile may expose the fact that the serious email was a group chat. A long stretch of silence can be forgiven. Laughing during a quarterly risk review is harder to explain.
What makes the ritual interesting is that most people recognize it because most people have performed some version of it. We understand the code. We also agree not to inspect it too closely.
Why Email Became the Perfect Alibi
Email is uniquely suited to this little workplace drama because it carries an aura of legitimate urgency.
Nobody knows whether the message on your screen requires an immediate response. It might be a contract problem, a scheduling conflict, or a request from a senior leader. Interrupting you to ask would be professionally intrusive, which gives the email its protective force.
Other distractions do not receive the same courtesy. Looking at social media suggests disengagement. Reading the news can look leisurely. Checking a calendar is respectable, but only briefly. Email, however, can explain almost any amount of concentration.
It also helps that modern knowledge work often blurs the line between communication and production. Microsoft reported in 2023 that the average Microsoft 365 user in its dataset spent 57% of working time communicating through meetings, email, and chat, compared with 43% creating in documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. That does not mean communication is not real work, but it does explain why opening an inbox can look productive even when nothing meaningful is being accomplished.
More recent Microsoft workplace research described employees as being interrupted by a meeting, email, or notification every two minutes during core working hours. The exact experience varies by role and organization, but the broader picture is recognizable: communication arrives so continuously that merely responding to it can consume the day.
In that environment, an email is not simply a message. It is evidence. It shows that demands are reaching you, that people require your input, and that you are participating in the moving machinery of the organization.
The strange part is that being visibly overwhelmed may improve the performance. A person calmly completing one important task can appear less industrious than someone clicking through six windows while apologizing for being “slammed.”
Workplace busyness has developed its own costume, and the inbox is one of its most convincing accessories.
The Meeting May Be the Real Problem
It would be easy to blame the person pretending to read. That is also the least interesting interpretation.
People usually reach for a distraction when the meeting has stopped giving them a reason to stay mentally present. Perhaps the discussion does not involve their work. Perhaps thirty people have been invited because nobody wanted to risk excluding the one person who might eventually be needed. Perhaps the meeting is an email wearing business-casual clothing.
Research from Microsoft examining remote and hybrid meetings found email multitasking in roughly 30% of remote meetings and file-based multitasking in about 25%. The researchers also found that longer and larger meetings were associated with more multitasking.
That pattern makes intuitive sense. A six-person decision meeting creates social and practical pressure to participate. A sixty-person update call creates an audience.
Once people become audience members, their behavior changes. They monitor for the moment that concerns them while quietly recovering pieces of the workday elsewhere. The inbox becomes the waiting room.
Atlassian’s workplace research has similarly found substantial frustration around meeting volume. In one survey, 80% of respondents said they would be more productive if they spent less time in meetings, while 54% said meetings dictated the structure of their days rather than leaving meaningful work as the priority. Another Atlassian report found that 76% felt drained on meeting-heavy days. These are company-published findings rather than universal laws, but they capture a common tension: meetings are supposed to coordinate work, yet too many can crowd out the work being coordinated.
This is where the Important Email Face becomes less an individual trick and more a collective compromise.
The employee agrees not to say, “I do not need to be here.”
The organization agrees not to ask why they have been staring at their inbox for twelve minutes.
Everyone preserves the appearance of participation.
We Are Not Actually Multitasking
The flattering explanation for checking email during a meeting is that we are managing several priorities at once. The less flattering explanation is that we are repeatedly abandoning one task for another and hoping neither notices.
The American Psychological Association describes this process as task switching rather than true simultaneous attention. Even brief shifts can create mental costs because the brain has to disengage from one set of rules and reorient itself to another. The cumulative loss can be significant, especially when the tasks are complex or unfamiliar.
This explains the classic meeting disaster. You spend five minutes answering an email, hear your name, look up, and discover that someone has asked for your opinion on “the second option.”
There are always two options. You do not know either of them.
So you deploy one of the emergency phrases:
“That’s a good question.”
“I think there are a couple of dimensions to consider.”
“I’d want to understand the downstream impact.”
These statements are the verbal equivalent of opening drawers while pretending you know where the batteries are.
The problem is not moral failure. Attention is limited, and workplaces often demand that employees treat it as infinitely divisible. The screen says, “Join the meeting.” The inbox says, “Reply now.” The chat says, “Quick question.” The project says, “Please finish the actual work.”
Naturally, something becomes theater.
The real trick is not doing two things at once; it is making each task believe it has your full attention.
When the Performance Becomes Bad Manners
Not every meeting deserves total concentration, but not every distraction is harmless either.
There is a meaningful difference between quietly clearing low-stakes messages during a company-wide presentation and writing emails while a colleague explains a problem that affects their work. The screen may look the same. The social meaning is not.
Attention communicates status. When someone speaks and you visibly turn elsewhere, you are not only managing time. You are signaling what deserves priority.
That signal becomes especially sharp in one-to-one conversations, interviews, performance reviews, brainstorming sessions, or emotionally sensitive discussions. Pretending to read email in those settings is not clever multitasking. It is absence with a keyboard.
There is also a power dimension. Senior employees can often glance at devices without being questioned because their distraction is interpreted as importance. Junior employees doing the same thing may be judged as unprepared or disrespectful. The behavior is identical, but workplace hierarchy supplies two different captions.
This is why “everyone does it” is not a complete defense. People do it under different conditions and absorb different risks.
The fairest question is not whether someone ever checks email during a meeting. It is whether their attention was actually necessary and whether another person had to work harder because it was missing.
A Better Alternative to Pretending
The obvious advice would be to close every tab, put away the phone, and become fully present. That sounds admirable until the fourth consecutive meeting begins and twenty-seven unread messages wait nearby like tiny administrative hostages.
A more realistic solution is to improve the choices around attention.
Before a meeting, it helps to ask whether you are there to decide, contribute, learn, or simply witness. If nobody can explain your role, the invitation may be the actual problem.
Organizers can make participation easier by sending a clear agenda, identifying decisions in advance, and inviting only the people needed for each part. Updates that require no discussion can often be handled asynchronously. Atlassian’s research into page-led meetings, for example, found that participants reported feeling more energized and less frustrated when written context helped structure the discussion. ([Atlassian][6])
Employees can also be more deliberate about when they check messages. If a meeting genuinely requires attention, closing the inbox removes the temptation to conduct two partial conversations. If the meeting is largely informational, it may be reasonable to listen while handling low-risk administrative work, provided that expectation is understood rather than secretly performed.
The useful distinction is between intentional multitasking and disguised disengagement.
Intentional multitasking says, “I am listening for the portion relevant to me while completing routine work.”
Disguised disengagement says, “I would like everyone to believe I am doing something urgent so nobody asks whether I am paying attention.”
The first can occasionally be practical. The second usually points to a meeting, workload, or workplace norm that nobody wants to address directly.
Retiring the Productivity Costume
The healthiest workplaces are not those where everyone maintains perfect eye contact through every update. They are the ones where people can be honest about what requires their attention.
That might mean declining a meeting, joining for only one section, asking for notes, blocking focused work time, or telling the organizer that another deadline needs priority. These choices are less theatrical than the Important Email Face, but they are also more useful.
They require trust, of course. Employees need to believe that protecting concentration will not be interpreted as a lack of commitment. Managers need to evaluate results rather than constantly visible activity. Teams need to stop using meeting attendance as a substitute for involvement.
Until that happens, the performance will survive. People will continue leaning toward their screens with the solemn concentration of diplomats negotiating peace, even when they are merely unsubscribing from a webinar series they do not remember joining.
What We Learned (or Didn’t)
What We Learned:
- The Important Email Face works because an inbox can make disengagement look like urgent professional responsibility.
- Longer, larger meetings create ideal conditions for covert email checking because many attendees are present as an audience rather than active contributors.
- A downward glance is not automatically rude, but it becomes revealing when someone else needs the attention being redirected.
What We Didn’t:
- Why typing “Thanks, noted” requires the facial intensity of someone reviewing a merger agreement.
- At what point a meeting becomes so crowded that checking email should be listed openly on the agenda.
- Why the colleague who is “just sending one quick reply” always returns precisely when the conversation reaches “So, what do you think?”
The Inbox Will Understand
Pretending to read an important email is funny because the performance is so familiar. Beneath it, though, sits a reasonable desire: people want a small amount of control over where their attention goes.
The answer is not to perfect the pose. It is to create fewer situations in which the pose feels necessary. A useful meeting should earn attention, and an important email can survive a few minutes without dramatic eyebrow work.
