Make More Static Documents

Focus on quality, not speed

If you were to join a work meeting about 10 years ago, upon entering the conference room, you would have been handed a printed-out agenda. This agenda was generally put together by more than one person, likely weeks in advance. Like a design or branch of code, they tested iterations of the agenda, adding and removing information as needed. When you received that agenda, the stack of pages in front of you was a product of their hard work. It meant something. It meant that this meeting was important, that your time was important.

Now, most people see a notification pop-up on their computer screen, alerting them to the upcoming meeting in 10 minutes. They pop open their document editor of choice, slap together an agenda or at least the bones of one, for meeting notes, and join the call. Sure, in some cases they prepared a bit. They asked participants for agenda items, links to files, and maybe sent it out the day before. But the intentionality of the process is no longer there.

To be clear, I am not talking about workshops or webinars, those generally have some considerable prep and take the form of a slide deck.

In a web-first world, there is the concept of the living document. This means two things to most people: the document is ever-evolving, think a wiki document—or this document is collaborative in real time, think Google Docs.

On the other hand, there are static documents. Think a PDF or a Photoshop file. These documents are finalized versions, cut in time. They generally have a bit more refinement, attention to detail, maybe even a round of QA.

There are clear benefits to the living document: speed and collaboration. While collaboration is powerful, not everything needs to be collaborative, I mentioned this in Making in Private. But the more important thing to consider here is speed. Should a meeting note be something that can be created and dished out in lightning speed, or is it something you should create with intentionality?

A few months ago, I wrote about embracing friction. I believe that the use of living documents is exactly the opposite of that. We should not wait until the meeting to plan for the meeting. We should not make shallow documents that can be edited at any time.

Static Meetings

We should be taking our time, planning for meetings. Meetings should not be this passive thing. They should be intentional, engaging, and thoughtful. Static documents support this.

Static documents force you to plan ahead. They allow you to think about the topic at hand. It is like studying for a test over a month, rather than the night before. Creating and delivering a static agenda, in the form of a PDF, 48–72 hours before shows that you care about that meeting.

Static Documents

There should be pride and ownership taken over a document—not just a status indicating that you own the file. This means creating a detailed, rich document that takes days or weeks, rather than minutes to create. When creating a file like this, you will likely have someone proof it—check it for quality, not just accuracy. Then delivering this document to someone, they will feel like it was tailored for them. It will feel personal.

The underlying narrative here is that we are too focused on getting the work done; we have forgotten why we are doing the work. Framing it through the documents we create is a simple way to check ourselves. If you make a meeting agenda 10 minutes before the meeting, should you even be there? No. If you are constantly fixing errors in a document, is that document actually helping anyone? No. We need to slow down, be intentional, and take pride in the quality of our work. A simple way to do this is by pressing export.