Meetings are the last resort

Meetings are expensive. Five people in a room for an hour costs five hours, not one. And for anyone doing work that requires deep focus, the recovery time after being pulled out of flow can be longer than the meeting itself.

So we write first. Proposals, questions, disagreements — all start on the page. If writing resolves it, no meeting is needed. Meetings are only for what writing cannot handle: misaligned assumptions, emotional friction, or decisions too tangled to untangle in text.

Even then, the meeting has a written purpose and a written outcome. A meeting is an exception, and exceptions must earn their place.