The meeting is the note you never wrote

I want to make a small and unfashionable case for writing things down, because I have come to believe that most of the meetings a small team dreads are not meetings at all. They are search parties. Everyone gathers, at the same time each week, to go looking for a decision that was made once, months ago, by people who are mostly no longer sure what it was. The meeting is not where the thinking happens. The meeting is where the team reconstructs, from memory and mood, a thing that would have fit in four sentences if anyone had bothered to type them.

Here is how it goes. Someone decides, in a corridor or a call, that the launch will be in March and the pricing will be simple and the one thing we will not do this quarter is the fancy integration everyone keeps asking for. Good decision. Clear at the time. Nobody writes it down, because at the time it is obvious, and obvious things do not feel like they need recording. Then three weeks pass. A new person joins. The person who made the call is on leave. Someone asks, reasonably, whether we are still doing the integration, and now you need a meeting, because the only copy of the decision was in one person's head and that head is on a beach.

Multiply that by every decision a team makes in a quarter and you have a calendar full of recurring meetings whose real purpose is to be a very slow, very expensive, very badly indexed filing system. People blame the meetings. The meetings are innocent. The meetings are a symptom. The trouble is that the decision was never given a home.

So I have a rule now, and it costs almost nothing. When a decision is made, someone writes it down before the group breaks up. Not minutes, nobody reads minutes. One short note in a place everyone can find: this is what we decided, this is why, this is the date. The whole thing takes ninety seconds and it buys back hours you will never see billed anywhere, because a meeting that does not need to happen leaves no trace. That is the trouble with good management. When it works, the evidence is an empty afternoon, and nobody thanks you for an empty afternoon. But the team turns faster, and the faster a small team turns, the more it can be. Write the decision down. It is the cheapest tool in the box and the one nobody reaches for.

Meetings That End is my guide to the alternative: meetings designed backwards from visible decisions, named owners, real dates and a definition of done.