Slow Work · Issue 41

The case for writing it down first

By Ines Calder · 9 minute read

Last spring I counted the meetings on my calendar that ended with someone saying "let me write this up." There were eleven in one month. In nine of them, the write-up would have been enough on its own. Nobody needed to be in the room. We needed a page, and the meeting was how we avoided writing it.

I don't think this is laziness. Writing is exposed in a way talking isn't. A sentence on a page can be quoted back to you next quarter. A thing you said in a call drifts away, softened by everyone's memory of it. So we talk, because talking is safe, and then we spend the next week arguing about what was agreed.

Here is what changed when my team started writing first. Not instead of meeting. First.

The meeting got shorter, then it got rarer

The rule was simple. If you want a decision, you write a page before anyone meets: what you propose, what you rejected, and what you are unsure about. People read it and leave comments. Then, only if the comments disagree, we meet.

In the first month the meetings still happened, but they started on the third question instead of the first. By the third month, about half of them never needed to happen at all. The comments had already done the work.

Quiet people started winning arguments

This was the part I didn't expect. In a live discussion, the person who speaks first and loudest sets the frame. On a page, the best-argued comment sets it. Two of the most useful people on the team almost never spoke in meetings. In written reviews they were the ones everyone waited for.

Writing slows the conversation down just enough for thinking to catch up with it. That is most of the benefit, and it costs very little.

What it costs

It is not free. A good page takes an hour, sometimes three. Some people find it hard at first and their early pages are long and unclear. And some decisions really are faster in a five-minute call, especially when two people already agree and just need to say so out loud.

So we kept one exception: if a decision can be reversed next week without much harm, nobody has to write anything. Just decide. The page is for the things that are hard to undo.

If you want to try it

Pick one recurring meeting and replace its first fifteen minutes with silent reading of a one-page brief. That's all. You will find out quickly whether the brief was enough, and your team will find out what it feels like to arrive at a meeting already knowing what it's for.

I wrote up the template we use, with the three headings and a worked example, so you don't start from a blank page.

Until next week,

Ines

You are getting Slow Work because you subscribed at slowwork.example. Unsubscribe any time.