Face to face communication is very underrated nowadays, probably because of the negative connotations associated with meetings. Talking to someone is by far the fastest way to convey information. I often prefer a quick chat than spending 30 minutes writing Slack messages back and forth. I agree that writing has other benefits and it's better in certain cases but we need to get out of the mindset that writing/async is always better.
The problem is that anyone who later needs to know what was in the meeting, even the two original participants, has no access to it. On the whole, more time is lost by people not being able to refer to what was actually said later than is saved by having it quickly and synchronously. You're making more work for yourself and everybody else in the long run.
Information overload. There’s tons of info on our Slack, but the vast majority is noise. If you saved transcripts from all Zoom meetings it would be mostly noise too. The benefit of meetings is that they be chaotic. Creating something succinct and sharable from them should be done later as a singular focused activity and stored in a wiki.
Default to async, hire people reasonable enough to request upgrading to synchronous communications when needed (cover ground faster or clear up miscommunications) but used judiciously.
The pacing part can be an issue. In particular when face to face people will want to look smarter, and let things slide even if they don't completely understand them, to preserve the flow.
It's only afterwards that it comes back to bite both sides.
> Face to face communication is very underrated nowadays, probably because of the negative connotations associated with meetings. Talking to someone is by far the fastest way to convey information.
Really depends on how the conversation is handled/going. I recently had a feedback from two people having a face to face meeting. One week later they followed up and they found out they completely misunderstood what they had said to each other.
Happens every time, that is way we write the "As per our meeting, we've decided that..." emails. Even with those, people still end with different interpetations
