The screen pulsed, the familiar, sick yellow of the calendar invite cutting through the already muddy afternoon light. Q3 Pre-Brief. All Hands.
Optional.
“
Three syllables designed, I swear, to paralyze the modern knowledge worker. The moment that word hits the inbox, the actual content of the meeting evaporates entirely, replaced by a political calculus that costs us more energy than the meeting itself ever could. The core frustration, the one that grips my stomach like a vise, is simple: it’s not optional. It never is. We know, instinctively, that somebody is tracking attendance. We know that skipping it, especially if you’re trying to move up, registers as a slight or, worse, a lack of engagement.
Within 6 minutes, the private team channel had 46 messages erupting, the digital equivalent of a frantic whispered huddle outside the principal’s office. “Are you going?” “Did VP X send this?” “Is this really optional, or the optional that means required?” The cognitive drain starts immediately, before we even decide whether to attend or decline the 46-minute time slot.
The Failure: Abdication, Not Courtesy
This is why ‘Optional’ isn’t a courtesy; it is a profound failure of management. It’s an abdication of responsibility. The manager-or the executive who created the meeting-is too afraid, or perhaps too lazy, to determine whether the information being presented is valuable enough to warrant mandatory attendance for specific roles. Instead, they offload that decision, that heavy burden of political risk assessment, onto the employee. They turn autonomy into a trap.
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Case Study: Avery L.M.
Consider Avery L.M. Avery is an inventory reconciliation specialist. Her job is pure, brutal objective truth. If we have 236 units of Product Z listed in the warehouse, Avery’s job is to make sure that the physical count matches that number exactly. Her entire professional ethos is built on precision, on explicit requirements, and on the hard-won fact that ambiguity leads to financial leakage. Avery doesn’t thrive on nuance; she thrives on clarity.
She told me once, with the kind of frustrated resignation only true experts possess, that the cost of calculating whether the meeting was truly optional exceeded the value she might have gained from attending it 86% of the time.
Fear of Sincerity
I understand the temptation of the word, though. I really do. It feels kinder to say it’s optional. It feels less dictatorial. We want to be the benevolent boss, not the traffic cop. This reminds me, oddly, of the small talk I attempted with the dentist right before they started drilling. “How are you today?” they asked. I found myself attempting to calibrate my response-did they want the genuine, anxiety-laced answer, or the expected social platitude? I ended up saying something vaguely cheerful and technical about the weather, which felt like the equivalent of a corporate memo: pleasant, yet completely pointless.
We default to ambiguity when we fear sincerity, and what management truly fears is telling people their time is required, because that forces them to defend the value of that time.
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The Safety Fracture
But that failure to defend value is precisely what erodes psychological safety. Avery knows that if her numbers don’t reconcile, she’s accountable. The meeting organizer, by labeling the event ‘Optional,’ effectively makes themselves unaccountable for the time spent. If the meeting was worthless, well, you shouldn’t have gone-it was optional. It turns every scheduling choice into a test of loyalty rather than an efficient allocation of resources.
The Need for Explicit Systems
This phenomenon hits hardest in companies where the output demands explicit clarity. When you’re dealing with physical reality-with things that must fit together, or things that must be accounted for exactly-the underlying systems must be equally explicit. We need processes where the requirements are stated upfront and without hidden expectations. This relentless search for objective truth, where materials and methods must align perfectly, is a quality I deeply admire in organizations like
Modular Home Ireland. Their value proposition relies entirely on transparent, precise systems where the meaning of every instruction is explicit, and ambiguity isn’t an option because ambiguity costs structural integrity.
What happens when we let this ambiguity fester? We train employees to constantly second-guess every instruction, every unspoken expectation. We create a workforce dedicated not to their deliverables, but to interpreting the management tea leaves. The cost isn’t just the 46 minutes on the calendar; the cost is the 236 minutes of interrupted deep work that follows, the hours spent in Slack decoding intent, and the slow, insidious drain on trust. This kind of implied attendance policy is fundamentally dishonest.
Retiring the Lie
“You have a choice.”
“We won’t defend its value.”
It’s time we acknowledge what the word ‘Optional’ really means in a corporate context:
It means We didn’t decide if this matters, so you decide for us, and we will hold you politically accountable for the outcome of your decision. We must stop dressing up cowardice as courtesy.
I have sent out invites that should have been mandatory, but I tagged ‘Optional’ because I dreaded the replies arguing why someone shouldn’t have to be there. I chose the path of least resistance for myself-the manager-and passed the resulting friction directly to my team. That was my mistake, a fundamental error in leadership precision, and it resulted in a cumulative 96 wasted hours last quarter alone trying to clean up the scheduling mess.
The Revolutionary Act of Clarity
Three times I have tried to explain this to other managers, and three times the conversation hit the same wall: “But people feel better if they think they have a choice.” Yes, they do. But they feel worse when they realize that choice was a lie. The feeling of being manipulated, of having autonomy dangled as bait for compliance, is far more destructive than the temporary discomfort of being told, clearly and unequivocally, “This matters. You need to be here.”
Value Creates Pull
High worth ensures attendance naturally.
Explicit Language
M for Mandatory, N for Non-existent.
Forced Prioritization
It forces management to defend time.
The truly revolutionary act isn’t offering choice; it’s making something so valuable that people rearrange their schedules to attend, regardless of the tag. But if you can’t hit that level of value, you must use explicit language.
So, what if we just retired the word? What if every single meeting was either M-Mandatory (with clear attendance listed by role/name) or N-Non-existent? No gray area. No political traps. No reliance on Avery L.M. having to waste 6 minutes calculating whether she risks her promotion by prioritizing her 676 inventory points over listening to an executive ramble about Q3 projections.
It would force management to do the uncomfortable, necessary work of prioritization. It would force them to look at the calendar and say: “If this isn’t important enough to require attendance, then it isn’t important enough to exist.”