Write the Doc First

Most meetings are documents that haven’t been written yet.

The discovery I keep making, in company after company, is that the work of writing a one-page memo before a discussion does more for the team than the discussion itself. The document forces the thinking the meeting was meant to compress. Once the thinking is on the page, half the meeting is unnecessary and the other half is much sharper.

The cost is real — somebody has to write the doc. The payoff is also real: a decision that holds for a quarter instead of one that has to be re-litigated next week.

A heuristic that has served me well: if the question is important and recurring, the answer should be a doc, not a meeting. If the question is important and one-off, the doc should still come first, and the meeting becomes a forty-minute review of it. If the question is unimportant — write it down in a single line and move on.

The companies I admire most are mostly writing companies wearing the costume of whatever else they do.