lulzx.comMost meetings should be a document.
A meeting takes an hour from five people. That's five hours gone. A document takes 30 minutes to write and 10 minutes each to read. Same information, four hours saved. The calendar still looks full if you only count rooms. The week is empty of the work.
I've worked with teams that had no meetings at all. Just shared documents, pull requests, and short messages. We shipped faster than any team I'd been on before. Nobody waited on Tuesday at 3. The page was already there when you sat down.
What the page has to hold
Writing forces the sentence to finish. In a room you can wave your hands and say you know what I mean. On a page you have to name the thing. Status, announcements, and the weekly slot that always ends twenty minutes early belong on a page. If the only outcome is that five people now know what one person already knew, you spent five hours to copy a paragraph.
When I need a decision, I write a one-page proposal with my recommendation and two alternatives. What we should do. What else I considered. What I need from you. People read it, comment, and we're done. No scheduling. The comments sit next to the claim they answer. A month later I can open the same page and see why we picked the first option.
A page without a recommendation is a meeting waiting to happen. Everyone arrives to discover the decision still has no owner. A page that hides the alternatives does the same trick from the other side. It asks people to rubber-stamp a feeling. I put the two options I am not taking on the page so the argument has somewhere to go besides a call.
When the room still wins
Some work wants voices in the same hour. A fight that has already gone in circles on the page. Two people who need to look at the same screen and type. A conversation where the point is the relationship, not the ticket. Those are rare if the writing is doing its job. I do not book the room first and hope the agenda appears. I write the page. If the comments stall on a real disagreement, then I spend the hour.
The tax is not only the hour on the invite. It is the hour before, when you cannot start a deep task because a call is coming, and the hour after, when the thread in your head is still the call. Five people means five of those scars. A document you can close.
I still talk to people. I still leave comments that run long. The default is the page, the PR, the ticket with a recommendation at the top. If we can decide from that, we already did.