Most Meetings Are a Failure of Writing

Most Meetings Are a Failure of Writing

Here is a test I run on almost every meeting before I accept it. Could this have been a document? If a well-written page would have done the same job, then the meeting is not a meeting. It is a tax on everyone's afternoon, collected because someone could not be bothered to write things down.

Think about what a status meeting actually is. Eight people sit in a room while one person reads aloud information that all eight could have absorbed in ninety seconds of silent reading at the time of their choosing. The format is slower, it is synchronous, and it forces the slowest speaker's pace onto the fastest reader's brain. We do it anyway, out of habit, and we call it collaboration.

A document is strictly better for transferring information. It can be read at the reader's speed. It can be skimmed, searched, and revisited. It survives the people who were out sick. It forces the author to actually think, because vague thinking produces vague prose and everyone can see it. A meeting hides muddled reasoning behind confident delivery. A page exposes it.

So the default should be writing, and meetings should be the exception you justify. When you find yourself scheduling one, ask what this specific gathering does that a memo cannot. Often the honest answer is "nothing, I just did not want to write," and that answer should send you back to the keyboard, not the calendar.

Because some meetings genuinely earn their place. There are things a document cannot do, and those are exactly the things worth gathering for. A real decision with live disagreement, where people need to hear each other's objections and adjust in real time. A hard conversation that needs tone and presence. A brainstorm where ideas build on each other faster than any thread can capture. Those are not taxes. Those are the point.

Notice the pattern. The meetings worth keeping are the ones with genuine back-and-forth, where the value comes from interaction that could not happen asynchronously. The meetings worth killing are the ones that are really just broadcasts, one person transmitting to many, which is precisely what writing does better. Sort your calendar by that distinction and half of it falls away.

There is a quiet benefit to teams that write instead of meet. Their thinking gets sharper, because writing is thinking made visible and editable. Their decisions get a record, so nobody re-litigates settled questions. And their best people get back the long uninterrupted hours that meetings shred into confetti. The cost of writing a good memo is real, but it is paid once, by one person, instead of repeatedly, by everyone.

So write the memo. If people still need to talk afterward, now they will talk about something that matters.