I hate how meeting people need to meet over everything. You start typing on slack something simply and they have to throw a zoom meeting at you. Seems overly hostile.
I get that it’s fun to bash excessive meetings, but trying to hash out a complex topic by lobbing Slack message grenades back and forth over the wall is often the worst idea.
But, typing can be a bottleneck for people I suppose, both in speed and pain as you say. I wonder if there’s a WPM inflection point for chat vs call preference.
For general coordination, a written medium is better, especially since one can take the time to be precise, and the content is searchable later as you say.
This way there are no ambiguities and no one can evade responsibility. This avoids a he-said vs she-said situation as well.
A meeting has value beyond just the words themselves, which is where writing meets its limit.
This itself is a victory. This means the subject needs more discussion or is too complex for a 5 minute meeting.
I prefer to spend 2 hours to make a subject clear to all parties rather than developing under a false interpretation and having to fix the issue through a grueling 5 day back and forth.
I think writing before and after the meeting is both desirable. Before to specify the object of the meeting and to limit its scope, afterwards to conclude and archive the decisions made.
I find that invasive too. For me, this often turns a 5 minute interaction that fits in the middle of a task into a 30 minute interaction with the same outcome, but with a huge interruption of my workflow, which may mean that I lost an hour or more.
However, pre-slack there used to be a certain type that would never read e-mail, but instead would call 5 seconds after the e-mail and want to be walked through the e-mail rather than read it themselves. Also had one time about 15 years ago where someone literally tried to break through a secure door to ask about an e-mail I had sent 3 minutes ago. I was on VPN @ home, and they got pissed off thinking I was just ignoring the call to my desk.