The meeting that could be a note

Hi, it's Nora.

Saturday was dinner, the decision that shows up every evening. Today is its office cousin, the thing that shows up every week whether it needs to or not: the recurring meeting.

I spent a decade in startups, where the running joke was that every company eventually becomes a series of meetings about other meetings. It wasn't really a joke. I watched teams of twelve people who were genuinely excellent at their jobs spend more than half their week in rooms, or on calls, talking about work they then had to do in the evening.

And here's what I noticed. Almost nobody chose that. Nobody sat down and said, "I'd like twenty two hours of meetings a week." It accumulated. A standup that made sense during a launch never stopped. A weekly sync with a team that's since been reorganized. A one on one that's become a status update that could be a paragraph. Each meeting was reasonable when it was created. Together they're a wall.

So this issue is about taking the wall down, one brick at a time, politely.

Most people count a meeting as its length. A thirty minute meeting costs thirty minutes.

It doesn't. A thirty minute meeting costs the thirty minutes, plus the five minutes before where you can't start anything real, plus the ten minutes after where you're catching up on what happened while you were in it. More importantly, it splits the time around it. A meeting at ten thirty turns a clean three hour morning into two fragments of ninety minutes, and ninety minute fragments are much worse for deep work than one three hour block. If it lands in your best two hours, it's doing real damage.

Then multiply by the people in the room. A one hour meeting with eight people isn't one hour. It's eight hours of combined time, most of it from people who spoke for two minutes and listened to things they'll get in the follow up email anyway.

Once you see meetings this way, you start asking a better question. Not "is this meeting useful," because almost every meeting is a little bit useful. The question is: "is this the cheapest way to get what this meeting is for?"

Often it isn't.

Pull up your calendar and list every recurring meeting you attend. All of them. Standups, syncs, one on ones, weekly reviews, monthly updates, the thing on Thursday that nobody can remember the purpose of.

Next to each one, write down three things:

What it's for. In one sentence. If you can't write the sentence, that's a finding.

What type it is. Almost every meeting is one of four kinds:

Your role. Are you needed, or are you attending?

This takes about twenty minutes, and it's usually a sobering twenty minutes. Most people find that the majority of their recurring meetings are information sharing and status, and that in about a third of them they're attending rather than needed.

Here's the rule of thumb, and it's the whole idea of this issue.

Information sharing meetings should almost always be notes. Reading is much faster than listening. A ten minute update read aloud takes three minutes to read, and people can read it when they're ready rather than when the calendar says so. The only exception is information that's likely to be upsetting, like a reorganization or bad news, where people deserve to hear it from a human.

Status meetings should usually be notes. Everyone writes three lines in a shared doc or channel by a set time. What I did, what I'm doing next, where I'm stuck. The meeting only happens if someone's stuck and needs help, and it only includes the people who can help.

Decision meetings should stay meetings, but shorter. Genuine group decisions benefit from real time discussion. But they're much better when the context goes out in writing beforehand, so the meeting is spent deciding, not explaining.

Relationship meetings should stay. One on ones with the people you manage, time with new teammates, the occasional team lunch. These are not waste. Trust is built in real time and it's worth every minute. Protect these while you cut the others.

Go through your list and mark each meeting: note, shorter, or keep.

Now the social part, which is where most people freeze. Nobody wants to be the person who cancels someone else's meeting.

The good news is you rarely have to cancel anything. You propose an experiment, and experiments are very hard to say no to.

If you run the meeting, it's easy. Send this: "For the next four weeks, let's try replacing Tuesday's sync with a written update. Add three lines to this doc by Tuesday at noon: what you did, what's next, where you're stuck. If anyone's stuck, we'll grab fifteen minutes. We'll look at how it went in four weeks." Then actually look at it in four weeks. Most teams never go back.

If someone else runs it and you're needed, suggest shortening it. "Could we try twenty five minutes instead of an hour for a few weeks and see if we miss anything?" Almost every meeting expands to fit its slot. Shrinking the slot is often enough.

If someone else runs it and you're just attending, ask to drop off. "I don't think I'm adding much to Thursday's meeting, and it lands in my focus time. Would it be OK if I read the notes instead, and you pull me in when something needs me?" Most organizers are relieved. You're making their meeting smaller and cheaper, and you're giving them a graceful way to let you go.

The pattern in all three: make it an experiment, give a reason that isn't a criticism, and offer a lighter alternative. It's the polite no applied to your calendar.

For the meetings you keep, a few small rules make a surprising difference.

Default to twenty five and fifty minutes. Most calendar tools let you change the default length. Do it. Those five and ten minute gaps are when people get water, reset, and arrive at the next thing on time.

No agenda, no meeting. If a meeting invite doesn't say what the meeting is for, decline it and ask. Kindly. "Happy to join, could you share what we're aiming to decide?" Half the time, the answer is a quick message and the meeting disappears.

Write down the decisions. At the end of every decision meeting, someone writes down what was decided and who's doing what by when. Two minutes. It prevents the most common meeting failure, which is everyone leaving with a slightly different version of what happened, and meeting again next week to find out.

Stand up, or walk. For short one on one conversations, a walk is often better than a room. People speak more honestly side by side than face to face, and you both get some air.

The main objection to replacing meetings with notes is that notes need writing, and nobody wants to write them.

This is a fair objection, and it's where tools genuinely help now. AI notetakers can join a call, transcribe it, and produce a summary with the decisions and action items, automatically, before you've closed the tab. That changes the math on meetings in two ways.

First, it means fewer people need to attend. If the meeting is recorded and summarized, the people who only needed the information can read the summary in two minutes rather than sit in the call for forty. You can say, with a clear conscience, "I'll catch the notes."

Second, it makes the meetings you keep more useful, because nobody's frantically typing and everyone's actually in the conversation.

A caution: always tell people when a meeting is being recorded, and check your workplace's rules before you do it. That's not optional, and it's also just courteous.

If you run this audit honestly, most people I know find somewhere between two and six hours a week. That's the equivalent of getting back most of a working day, every week, without working any faster.

Don't spend it all on more work. Spend some of it on the thing you're actually trying to finish this quarter. Spend some of it on leaving on time. Put the rest back into the white space that makes the rest of the week manageable.

Do the audit. Twenty minutes, every recurring meeting, marked note, shorter, or keep. Then pick one meeting to change, and send the four week experiment message before Friday.

Just one. Next month, pick another.

Back Saturday, when I want to talk about the end of the working day, and why so many of us never actually leave work even when we close the laptop.

Better, not busier.

Nora Bishop

P.S. The notetaker I use is Fathom, which is now part of Superhuman. It joins Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams calls, records and transcribes them, and sends a clean summary with action items a few seconds after the call ends. The free plan is genuinely generous, which is rare. It's the reason I can say "I'll catch the notes" to half my meetings. (That's a referral link, so I may get a small thank you if you sign up, at no cost to you.)