This Meeting Could Have Been an Email
After an hour-long meeting, all that's left is a page of notes and a sense of futility. Why do we keep gathering?
Blue, Green, Purple
Monday morning. Open Google Calendar.
Blue, green, purple blocks crammed edge to edge. 10 AM sprint meeting. 11 AM design review. 2 PM tech share. 3:30 PM project sync. 4:30 PM 1-on-1.
No time to code. I have to squeeze code into 30-minute gaps between meetings. And 30 minutes is barely enough to rebuild context. Meetings prevent you from working, you can't work so you stay late. How do you even deal with this irony?
The Real Cost of One Hour
Six people in a one-hour meeting.
That's 6 person-hours. Convert to senior developer hourly rates and a single meeting costs hundreds of dollars. Three of these in a day and a significant chunk of the team's daily cost is spent in conference rooms.
If the goal is information sharing, a single document handles it in 10 minutes. If the goal is a decision, you need 2-3 decision-makers, not 6. But "let's have fewer meetings" is easy to say and hard to do. Why?
Because It Feels Like Working
Attending a meeting feels productive.
Talk for an hour, exchange opinions, scribble notes -- you walk out feeling like you accomplished something. Then you step out of the room and realize nothing actually changed. (The fact that this sense of emptiness has become familiar is kind of scary.)
The trap of meetings is that they blur discussion and execution. "We discussed this issue" masquerades as "we solved this issue." A truly productive meeting ends with who does what by when. Without that, it was just a conversation.
"Let's Set Up a Meeting for This"
One pattern that got worse with remote work.
A discussion starts on Slack. Messages go back and forth. Then someone says "let's set up a meeting for this." 30-minute meeting gets scheduled. Six people join the Zoom call. It wraps up in 15. The remaining 15 minutes are filler -- ending early feels awkward, so people pad the time.
A Slack thread could have handled it from the start. But organizing thoughts in text takes effort, while scheduling a meeting is easy. It's choosing easy chatting over the harder work of writing. I do it too. (Working on it.)
The Power of One Document
Our team ran a one-month experiment.
"Share a document before any meeting." One rule. That's all we added, and a third of our meetings vanished. Writing things out clarified the issues, and some resolved without anyone needing to gather. The meetings that survived got shorter -- no background explanation needed, so we jumped straight into the real discussion.
Of course, some meetings are necessary. When there's conflict, when nuance won't translate through text, when rapid brainstorming is needed. In those cases, gathering is right.
Make Room on the Calendar
Today I look at my calendar again.
Maybe I'll decline one of tomorrow's three meetings. Maybe I'll send a one-line question: "What's the purpose of this meeting?" Haven't sent it yet. Feels a bit awkward.
Empty slots on the calendar are time to write code. And that's when I'm actually doing my job.
The most productive meeting is the one that never happens. Though saying that in a meeting would be a bit much.