Confessions of a meeting skeptic

My case against meetings

You know my type, because you have one of me in your office. I decline by default. I ask what the agenda is, knowing there's no agenda. I once responded to a recurring invite with a one-line note that said this meeting is a rerun.

The case was always the same. An hour of talk produces about thirty seconds of actual decisions, and even those evaporate by Friday. The recurring meeting exists mostly to re-discuss what the last one already settled, because nobody can produce what the last one settled. Multiply by a team, by a week, by a year. That was my sermon, and I could deliver it on request.

The experiment

This spring I started recording the meetings I run. My act, my responsibility: I asked the room at the top of every single one, and when our office manager asked that a compensation discussion stay out of the record, it stayed out. Nobody ever said no to the rest. Most people said finally.

Paredra transcribed each meeting and wrote the notes. A summary I didn't have to write, the decisions that were actually made, and a line for every commitment: who said they would do a thing, in their own words, and when they said it would be done. Not a due date some software invented. The words the person used. Friday. End of month. After the offsite.

The record confessed for everyone, starting with me

Every commitment from every meeting lands in one ledger. Who, what, their stated when, and whether it's still open or done. I started reading it on Monday mornings, the way you read a bank statement after a loose month.

In week six I counted, myself, going back through the record: we'd decided the same vendor question three separate times, in three separate meetings, because nobody could produce the first decision when the topic came back. The rerun meeting I'd been mocking for years wasn't a character flaw of my colleagues. It was the natural behavior of a team with no memory. I'd been blaming the people when the missing piece was the record.

And then there was the other discovery, the one this headline promised. Reading the ledger with my own name in it is a different experience from complaining about meetings. Some of the open items were mine. Older than I'd like to print. The ledger keeps your sentence exactly as you said it, so the pool of available excuses is shallow.

Replaying the thirty seconds that mattered

My old complaint stands: an hour of talk, thirty seconds of decision. What changed is that I can now go straight to the thirty seconds. The note links a commitment to the moment in the recording where it was said. Press play and there's the sentence, with the caveat the person attached to it, which is usually the part everyone forgets and always the part that matters. When the vendor question came back a fourth time, I didn't re-argue it. I searched for the vendor's name, opened the meeting where we settled it, and played the decision to the room. The topic died in under a minute.

What it does not do

Paredra hasn't told me which meetings to cut. It doesn't score my calendar, doesn't flag patterns in my week, doesn't deliver a verdict on Mondays. The reading was mine, the counting was mine, and the canceling was mine: one recurring meeting is gone because I could show that its last four instances re-decided the same two questions, and the record made that case in five minutes. A skeptic keeps his skepticism. What changed is that the argument is now something I can look up instead of something I have to feel.

So here's the confession, in full. Most meetings should still be emails. But the ones that deserve to happen were never the problem. The problem was that we held them, decided things, and then let the decisions evaporate, which guaranteed we would hold them again. Keep the record, and the calendar starts to clean itself. It just needs a person willing to read.