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Comment by _ea1k | Hacker News Reader

You don't understand. If I arrange everything into written words and send out an email with a link to the document, noone will read it.

Instead, I must invite 10 people to do other things while I talk on a zoom call! "Sorry, I was multitasking"

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I mean you can't make people read an email but I feel like you would have a much higher success rate if the content was in the email itself. You're competing with the other work that people have to do and actually get graded on, why add a layer of indirection?

People don't read the email itself, they just want to 'over it together' because lazy/no reading comprehension/whatever the reason is. So many meetings have 10+ people there who have no clue what this meeting is about while the agenda, questions, possible answers etc are in the email. So I usually start (if it's my responsibility to do so) with; how about you read the email for a few minutes before we start. Which is usually met with 'why don't you go over it line by line with us, share screen and read it'. Drives me bonkers. Granted, these are usually very big partner companies for which the employees (including middle management) see this as some break in their day, so they don't really care about the time spent or the outcome.

We meet in person and have a culture where closing your laptop is followed pretty well.

That's so quaint, you all must be in the same place!

Except for the guy who built the thing who lives elsewhere and can’t join the offsites

TBH, if everyone involved is invested in what is being said, you don't need to be in person and you don't need to shut laptops.

If that is the majority of your meetings, you are in a good place.

The mistake is to think the rules are what makes the meeting useful. Having the right audience, an agenda, and appropriate expectations for the outcomes are the useful things.

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