If It Can Be Written Down, Why Does It Need a Meeting?

People who have worked with me—managers, peers, juniors—probably already know that I’m not exactly a big fan of meetings.

Especially meetings with no clear objective.

No clear expected output.

Or the kind where someone spends an hour presenting something I could probably read myself in ten minutes from a deck or a spreadsheet.

I’m not anti-meeting.

There are plenty of situations where talking directly is simply faster.

But I do think we use meetings too often as the default, instead of treating them as just one communication option among many.

There’s an issue?

Meeting.

There’s an update?

Meeting.

A new requirement?

Meeting.

Something that could probably be answered in three lines of chat?

Meeting too.

Sometimes it feels like sending a calendar invite has become a reflex.

And I think that reflex is expensive.

Not because Zoom or Google Meet costs money.

It’s expensive because meetings consume a much scarcer resource:

multiple people’s time at the same time.

A one-hour meeting is not one hour

Suppose you have a one-hour meeting with eight people.

On the calendar, it looks like one hour.

In reality, you just consumed eight hours of human time.

And that doesn’t include the cost of stopping whatever people were doing before the meeting.

Context switching.

Waiting for the meeting to start.

The meeting running over.

Then spending another few minutes trying to get back into whatever they were doing before.

But the part I find even more expensive is that for a meeting to happen, everyone needs to be available at the same time.

That synchronization cost can be much higher than the duration of the meeting itself.

You’ve probably had situations where the topic was actually pretty simple, but the discussion had to wait until next week because one person was only free on Tuesday, someone else could only do Thursday, someone was on leave, and the person with decision-making authority had a completely full calendar.

A decision that could perhaps have been made today through writing gets delayed for a week just because we wanted everyone in the same room at the same time.

That’s why my default preference is usually asynchronous communication.

Documentation.

Email.

Chat.

Comments in a document.

Write first.

Give people time to read.

If everything becomes clear through writing, great.

No meeting needed.

If there’s still disagreement, confusion, or the discussion starts going back and forth without making progress, then:

okay, let’s talk.

And even then, maybe it doesn’t need to be a one-hour meeting.

A fifteen-minute call might be enough.

Writing forces us to think first

There’s another reason I prefer written communication.

I think writing improves the quality of thinking.

When we speak, we can think while talking.

Sometimes that’s useful.

Sometimes the result is also just...

a lot of talking.

Someone speaks for five minutes when the actual point could have been two sentences.

Someone else responds before fully understanding the problem.

The discussion branches into three directions.

Then forty-five minutes later, everyone is still trying to remember what the meeting was actually supposed to solve.

When you have to write something down first, you’re forced to be slightly more disciplined.

What is the actual problem?

What’s the context?

What do we already know?

What don’t we know?

What decision do we need?

What am I actually asking these people?

Sometimes the act of writing the document already solves half of the problem.

Because while trying to explain something clearly, you start realizing:

“Oh. There’s actually a hole in my assumption here.”

Or:

“My question isn’t even clear yet.”

Or maybe:

“I don’t need eight people in a meeting. I actually just need an answer from two of them.”

That’s why, when I want to have a fairly important discussion, I usually prefer to write a one-pager first.

It doesn’t need to look impressive.

It doesn’t need to become a twenty-page PRD.

Just enough context, the problem, what needs to be discussed, and what kind of outcome is expected.

Share it before the meeting.

Let people read it.

Best case?

They answer in the document and the meeting gets cancelled.

Good.

I don’t think cancelling a meeting because the problem has already been solved is a failure.

That’s efficiency.

People also have different times when they think best

There’s another thing synchronous discussions tend to ignore.

Not everyone is in their best thinking state at the same hour.

In a meeting, one person might be fully focused.

Someone else may have just come out of another meeting.

Someone is replying to Slack on the side.

Someone has another call in fifteen minutes.

Someone actually has a good opinion, but needs some time to think before they can articulate it properly.

And some people are simply better at forming ideas after they’ve had time to read and process the information first.

Asynchronous communication gives people that space.

I can send a document at 10 AM.

Someone reads it at 11.

Someone else only gets to it at 3.

As long as it isn’t urgent, I don’t really see a problem with that.

In many cases, I’d rather get a thoughtful answer three hours later than force someone to produce an opinion in thirty seconds just because it’s their turn to speak.

To me, that’s also a form of respecting people’s time.

Not just:

“Let’s keep the meeting short.”

But asking:

“Do I even need to take a slot from this person’s calendar?”

Writing also makes it harder for everyone to suddenly forget

There’s another benefit of written communication that is maybe a little less philosophical.

Evidence.

In larger organizations, decisions often involve a lot of people.

And a few months later, you might hear:

“Wait, didn’t we agree on A?”

“No, I thought it was B.”

“I never approved that.”

“Wasn’t that requested by their team?”

And then begins one of the corporate world’s favorite sports:

passing responsibility around.

Written discussions make this much easier.

Here’s the email.

Here’s the comment in the document.

Here’s the decision from that date.

Here’s why we chose A instead of B at the time.

Documentation doesn’t magically solve office politics.

I wish.

But at least the factual history becomes harder to rewrite based on whoever happens to remember the story most confidently.

And I don’t think this is about distrusting people.

Human memory is just unreliable.

Mine definitely is.

I don’t want to depend on my own memory to reconstruct a decision we made six months ago either.

Writing it down is actually more fair.

The organization doesn’t have to depend on the person with the strongest memory—or the strongest confidence.

Documentation is organizational memory

The value of writing also doesn’t stop once the decision is made.

Imagine someone joins the team six months later.

They look at something in the product and ask:

“Why does the flow work like this?”

If there’s no documentation, what usually follows is an archaeological expedition.

Ask Product.

Product says maybe ask Engineering.

Engineering says it was probably requested by Business.

Business says the person who requested it already left the company.

Eventually someone says:

“I think there was a reason.”

Amazing.

With proper documentation, the new person can read it themselves.

What was the context at the time?

What constraints existed?

What alternatives were considered?

Why did we choose this option?

Maybe that old decision no longer makes sense.

Fine.

In fact, now we actually have a basis for changing it.

The important thing is that organizational context doesn’t disappear every time someone resigns or moves to another team.

I think organizations that rely too heavily on oral history are fragile.

Their knowledge doesn’t really belong to the organization.

It belongs to a few people who just happen to still work there.

And when those people leave, some of the company’s memory leaves with them.

But I also don’t want every discussion to become a 73-comment thread

At this point, it might sound like I want everyone to stop talking and move permanently into Google Docs.

I don’t.

Async communication has limits too.

Sometimes writing creates misunderstanding.

Sometimes the problem is genuinely ambiguous.

Sometimes there’s conflict, and fifteen minutes of talking directly is much more human than fighting through paragraphs for three days.

Sometimes you’re exploring a problem and real-time discussion is simply faster.

Sometimes there’s an urgent incident.

Sometimes a decision has enough dependencies that getting everyone relevant into one room really is the most efficient option.

And if a discussion has reached the point of:

reply
reply
quote
clarify
reply again

maybe that is actually a sign that you should just get on a call.

I’m not anti-meeting.

I just think meetings should be used when synchronous communication is genuinely the better tool.

Not because it’s the habit.

If a meeting is necessary, at least make it useful

When a meeting really is needed, I think a few simple things make a huge difference.

First:

Be clear about the objective.

Why do these people need to be there?

“Discuss Project X” is not really an objective.

Are we making a decision?

Resolving disagreement?

Clarifying a requirement?

Exploring solutions?

Choosing between option A and B?

Be specific.

Second:

Define the expected output.

After the meeting ends, what should be different from before the meeting started?

Is there a decision?

An owner?

A next action?

A list of questions that have now been answered?

If you don’t know what the output is supposed to be, there’s a decent chance the meeting will just wander around.

Third:

Write the context before the meeting.

I like one-pagers because they’re short enough to read, but long enough to force the writer to think.

Send the document before the meeting.

Let people comment if they want.

Don’t spend the first twenty minutes of the meeting reading something out loud that everyone could have read themselves.

I can read.

Thank you.

And fourth:

The meeting should still end in writing.

This is the part that often disappears.

The meeting ends.

Everyone feels like they agreed.

Nobody writes the decision down.

Three weeks later, everyone has a slightly different interpretation.

Even when there is a meeting note, sometimes it looks like:

Discussed issue A.
Discussed issue B.
Next step to follow up.

Well...

thanks.

What actually matters is:

What was decided?

Why?

Who owns what?

By when?

What is still open?

The tricky part is that if you’re actively participating in the discussion, it’s difficult to also create good notes at the same time.

I deal with that too.

So if the meeting is important enough, there should be some clarity on who owns the documentation.

Or use recording and transcription as raw material, then clean it up after the meeting.

The tool doesn’t matter that much.

The important part is that the decision doesn’t only live in the heads of the people who attended.

For me, the default is still: write first

If I had to summarize the way I prefer to work, it would be something like this:

Write first.

Explain the context.

Explain the problem.

Explain what you need from other people.

Give them a chance to read and respond asynchronously.

If it gets resolved, great.

If it doesn’t, then call.

And when you do call, the discussion can be much more focused because everyone already has the context.

Then after the discussion, write down what was decided.

To me, this isn’t really about productivity hacks like “how to save 37 minutes every day.”

It’s more about respect.

If I invite five people to a one-hour meeting, I’m asking five people to give part of their time to my problem.

At the very least, I should know why I need them there.

And I should have done the work to explain the problem properly before asking for their time.

Maybe that’s also why I like documentation so much.

Writing makes us slightly more accountable to our own thinking.

Before asking people to listen, we’re forced to explain.

Before answering, people get time to read.

After a decision is made, everyone has something they can return to later.

Meetings still have a place.

Definitely.

I just don’t think they should always be the first place we go.

Sometimes, before sending that calendar invite, it might be worth stopping for a second and asking:

“Does this really need a meeting, or do I just need to write it more clearly?”