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Comment by PLenz | Hacker News Reader

You've made a key mistake. Slides are made of text and images but use the narrative language of TV and movies. Storytelling (and all slide decks are stories) using the tropes of written language results in terrible powepoints, the timing is all off. Whenever you find yourself in a situation where you have a deck that needs to be a doc you've found yourself in a meeting thay could have been an email.

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Amazon disagrees:

We generally had a doc, read it, and then discussed it.

In my experience, those meetings were much more informed and focused than meetings with presentations.

> Whenever you find yourself in a situation where you have a deck that needs to be a doc you've found yourself in a meeting thay could have been an email.

So all of them? I don't disagree that all of my undergrad classes would have been better if they just e-mailed me a doc.

Is there a good way to decide when to do a meeting and when to write an email?

yes, start by writing an email, if you feel it's impossible to solve the issue with the email, set up a meeting

I like that! It also prepares the meeting in case you need one. Thanks for sharing

It's a trust thing - the more trust the less it needs to be a meeting. Unfortunately most companies and client relationships are low trust and need facetime to build towards that high trust environment.

I think it takes experience.

You send out an email and people misinterpret it, and there’s some nuance, and there’s a bunch of back and forth communication, but nothing ever gets resolved—maybe that should have been a meeting.

You set up a meeting to explain something to 50 people in your department—maybe that could have been an email.

Synchronous tools like meetings shine when a topic is ambiguous, contentious, or requires debate. You can have a dialog.

Asynchronous tools like email or even Slack are better for topics with less ambiguity, aren't controversial, or doesn't require a ton of back and forth.

Lastly, meetings are better for building relationships, trust, etc.

I think the simple rule is when you need to persuade when choosing among multiple ambiguous options, you must also rebut counterarguments (even "devil's advocate"), so a meeting is more concise at reaching a decision than an email chain.

So basically any ambiguity about the outcome. When you're not sure what hill to take, when there's competing priorities, when there's conflicting information and you need alignment, when there's risk and you need to spread it appropriately.

The reason you need a meeting is an email by itself will be insufficiently conclusive, and everyone writing emails will be talking past each other.

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