Your Company Should Be Writing Instead of Meeting and Here Are Four Reasons Why

Meetings suck and we all know it. It’s time you started writing.

I want to talk about four ways that replacing meetings with long-form writing can help give your company a significant boost, but first I want to ramble a bit..

I spend a lot of time on Twitter, for better or for worse. It can be easy to get lost in the barrage of trolls, hot takes, and memes, but it’s not all bad. There is a lighthouse of hope that beams across the digital sea, beckoning the boats that drift along to meet at its shore. Believe it or not, there are people on Twitter who truly want to help. People who want to impart their knowledge — broad or specific — in hopes that it will somehow make your life a little bit better.

Something I saw while scrolling through “Business Twitter” is what brought me to write this piece. If you follow that sub-section of Twitter at all then you have likely come across the tweets of David Heinemeier Hansson. DHH can be opinionated, brash, and poetically aggressive at times. He is also someone who truly wants to see a change in the ways that businesses operate in favor of making everything less shitty. He is a strong advocate for privacy rights as well as a fair — and dare I say — enjoyable work-life for employees.

I have long been a Basecamp fanboy and it’s almost entirely due to the way that the Cofounders, Jason Fried and DHH, run the company and treat their employees. Maybe I’ll write about the myriad of perks and benefits that Basecamp offers — notably, not treating their employees like shit — but that is for another day. You can also just check out their series of books on business and more specifically, working within a remote company.

Something that Jason and DHH constantly reference is the fact that most meetings are a waste of time and money. On the surface, we all probably feel this way. I’m sure every person reading this will have, at some point, sat in a room with their coworkers to talk where there was no set agenda, no one took notes, everyone shouted their ideas all at once, and then all broke away to go work on whatever the hell they thought the takeaways were. I say “on the surface” because even though we all recognize the waste that meetings are, we still go to them. We still continue to set them and we still continue to not prepare for them. This is increasingly relevant in the age of Covid-19, where many companies are suddenly working remote and have no idea what to do with their days other than fill them with Zoom meetings.

Without going into much detail, DHH is not a fan of Zoom.. the company or the practice. They have some shady privacy policies and they either lack the capability to implement or willfully ignore some security measures. He has posted a few times about Zoom alternatives, but this was the one that really sat with me.

As a person who likes to think of themselves as a writer (or at least pretends to be one) I — shockingly — think of writing as a valuable skill. The ability to write coherently is especially important in business and I don’t think people put nearly enough thought or effort towards bettering themselves in an area that is vital to being a strong communicator. I believe most people think being a good communicator simply means they are always available to respond. This is a dangerous way of thinking not only because it doesn’t give you time to formulate your thoughts and give a meaningful response, but it means that you are never allowed to turn yourself off from your work.

I’ve gone on this long to make one specific point:

Writing is a huge piece that you and your company are most likely missing that will not only help increase overall productivity, but it will also help everyone retain a little bit of sanity.

Here are four reasons why I believe writing is crucial and meetings are not.

This one is simple. The more time people are required to spend in meetings the less time they are going to have to focus on their actual job. It’s really easy to let the day get away from you as meetings start to pile up. You can go from “ready to get shit done” to “guess I’m sitting in this conference room all day” in the blink of an eye. You may not realize it, but meetings occupy their scheduled time as well as the time around them. You need to (see: should) spend time prepping before each meeting — coordinating schedules for everyone involved, putting an agenda together, etc.. and then you need to (again, see: should) spend time organizing after each meeting — formalizing and dispersing meeting notes, figuring out what the takeaways actually were, etc.. A meeting scheduled for an hour can easily take an hour and a half or more out of your day. It may look like you only have three hours worth of meetings on your calendar, but in reality it equates to something closer to four and a half. Over half your day is now gone. In those remaining three and a half hours you have to fit: lunch, emails, actual work, and you might even need to go to the bathroom once or twice.

Unless something is truly urgent, expecting an immediate response to a question is not only an asshole move because you are assuming that whatever you are asking is instantly more important than whatever the recipient of your question is working on, but it takes away from you getting the best answer they can give. Allowing someone a bit of time to sit with your question, formulate their thoughts, and then write them in a succinct way gives everyone what they need. My team has recently left Slack entirely and started utilizing the message board feature in Basecamp instead and I don’t think I will ever go back. We still use chat for insignificant work things and talking shit, but chat will never be our main form of work communication again.

A constant barrage of meetings, emails, and chats can be mentally draining. Your brain is being pulled in a thousand different directions, none of which is the direction of productivity. Let people work in peace. Instead, you should put down your thoughts explaining what your issue is, what you think might happen, what you would like to happen, ideas how that can be accomplished, or whatever else and then send it away. The people you’re looking for answers from will then be able to do the same for you. This process accomplishes a couple things. First, it let’s people finish whatever is on their plate at the moment before they move on to something else. As Ron Swanson would say, they get to whole-ass one thing instead of half-assing two things. Second, it doesn’t put people in that anxious “shit, I have to get this back asap while also thinking of everything” mindset. Feeling like you are being rushed sucks and it interferes with producing quality work.

I am going to say something shocking right now.. Sometimes people don’t pay attention in meetings. It can be because whatever the meeting is about doesn’t actually pertain to them or it can be because they are staring at their laptop digging through all the emails and chats they have to respond to or it can be because they are doing actual work or it can be.. you get the point. Instead of having a room full of people partially paying attention who will most likely need to go and disperse information to other people to actually accomplish whatever was talked about, take the time to write down your thoughts and then send them out. This gives you the time to really think through whatever it is you want to talk about and then it gives your recipients time to dedicate real thought into giving a response. It also allows everyone who may be involved at some point access to every thought and idea verbatim instead of hearing it through the grapevine.

You may have noticed a few points repeated over these last thousand-ish words. Good. They are important and deserve repetition. I really do understand why people think meetings are important, though. We’ve all been taught that “huddling together” is the best way to pump out great work, but this isn’t Mad Men. Sure, in the 60’s it did make sense to get everyone in a room because there wasn’t any other seemingly-efficient way, but things are different now. Our companies have adapted with changes over time so why can’t the way we communicate?

Does your company bombarde it’s employees with meetings? Do you have processes that are a bit more updated and friendly? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter at @MisterJHuffman!

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