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Comment by agentultra | Hacker News Reader

> if the goal is instead to deliver info to the attendees, your meeting should be an email

If we just stuck to this rule I would have hours of more time to do actual work.

So many “meetings,” are listening to folks um-and-ah their way through their slides. They read the exact text they wrote. Slowly. It’s painful.

Just send an email.

If this happens in recurring meetings, make an email digest.

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The flip side of “this meeting should have been an email” is that people need to read their email. I think Slack, always on and always interrupting, has eroded thoughtful email habits.

As I grow older, and perhaps comfortable in my skin/being fired/whatever, I will actually just ask for the document to be shared before leaving the meeting in these cases

This is one of the few things I actually liked about the way Amazon did meetings. The standard was to distribute the document first, or in the event that couldn’t be done, to provide a link to the document at the very beginning of the meeting.

You’d spend the first part of the meeting with everyone reading the document (and maybe commenting on it, if you gave them the link), and then once everyone had read the document, you could start discussing it. They made heavy use of “Quip” as a shared document writing/commenting system for anything that was still being worked on, although official documents would need to be in Microsoft Word format.

For the meeting class of employees it would take them longer to write the half page memo than to have the hour long meeting.

Then it's in our interest to push the use of AI to support the meeting class to dictate stream-of-consciousness updates and get a cleaned up memo ready for email. But of course, this risks reducing the (self?)-perceived importance of demanding realtime attention in live meetings.

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