The Meetings That Should Have Been Memos

The Ninety-Minute Summary Email

A few months ago I sat through a ninety-minute meeting that ended with someone saying, "I'll just send a summary email." That phrase landed differently than it usually does.

Because we had just spent ninety minutes producing something that could have been written in twenty and read in five. Nobody wasted time on purpose.

Everyone came prepared, everyone was professional. And yet we'd all traded a concentrated afternoon for a discussion that a well-structured document would have handled better.

 Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Thinking

The Distinction Most Teams Don't Make

A meeting is a synchronous tool. Everyone thinks at the same time, constrained by the pace of whoever is speaking.

Meetings are the right tool for real-time negotiation, emotionally charged conversations, and decisions needing live back-and-forth. For everything else, they're the expensive default.

A memo is an asynchronous tool. The writer thinks carefully before anyone else reads a word.

The reader responds when their attention is full, not divided. Better suited for sharing context, presenting options, and documenting decisions.

Attio's AI handles my morning prep — surfacing insights from calls, updating records without manual entry, and answering pipeline questions in seconds. No searching, no switching tabs, no manual updates.

Start now →

Why We Keep Choosing Meetings Anyway

Most teams default to meetings because scheduling one takes thirty seconds. Writing something clearly requires you to think clearly first.

William Zinsser observed that writing is thinking made visible-which is precisely why it feels harder than booking a room.

There's also a quiet psychological reason. A meeting gives you the feeling of having handled something. You were in the room. You spoke.

You left. That sense of completion is real, even when nothing durable was produced. Writing a memo makes your thinking visible before anyone has agreed to it. So we schedule a meeting instead and call it collaboration.

The Hidden Cost Is Cognitive

The real cost isn't the time a meeting takes—it's that it borrows attention from thinking that had nowhere else to happen.

You can recover a calendar slot. Recovering the state of focus a poorly-timed meeting interrupted is much harder.

The work that requires your clearest mind keeps getting deferred to after the next meeting. Which never ends.

One Question Before You Send the Invite

Before scheduling, I now ask: Does this require real-time thinking together, or does it require one person to think clearly first?

If someone needs to think clearly first-to organize information, present analysis, lay out options-that's a memo.

The meeting, if it happens at all, comes after. People arrive already oriented. The discussion is shorter and almost always more useful.

What This Looks Like

Calendar invite: "Discuss Q3 priorities." Fifteen people. No pre-read. Forty-five minutes later the room has drifted through four tangents with no decision.

Now imagine: Organizer spends forty minutes writing a clear two-pager. Context, three options, their recommendation, one question. Sent two days before. You read it in eight minutes. The meeting takes twenty minutes and ends with a decision.

The memo didn't replace the meeting. It made the meeting worth having.

ChatGPT is insanely powerful.

But most people waste 90% of its potential by using it like Google.

These 1,000+ proven ChatGPT prompts fix that and help you work 10X faster.

Sign up for Superhuman AI and get:

Claim your free prompts

Format Problems Are Solvable

The frustration most people feel isn't really about meetings. It's about the specific kind where everyone is present but no one was quite ready. That's not a culture problem. It's a format problem.

It doesn't require calendar reform. It just requires one person, somewhere in the chain, to write something down before calling everyone together.

Think of one recurring meeting on your calendar. Could a well-written update sent ahead replace it-or at least cut it in half? Reply and tell me what you find.

References: