The following are five discrete benefits to a high-documentation, low-meeting culture that we’ve seen first-hand at Tremendous. But the intangible, overarching benefit of practicing meeting mindfulness is this: you spend less of your day sort-of-listening and more of your day really thinking.
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While we are a high-documentation culture, we’re also low-process. Rather than bogging down innovative thinking with layers of administrative work and approvals, we encourage people to move fast.
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- process improvement, innovation, red tape,

It’s not just about the meeting, which is itself a thirty to sixty-minute intrusion on someone’s day. It’s about the time wasted anticipating a meeting, where people feel they don’t have the time to plunge into an important project.  It’s also about the 15 or so minutes after the meeting when people are reorienting their frame of mind to tackle the problems they were focused on before the interruption.
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We deliberately encourage people to create documents rather than build slide decks. Slide decks can mask poorly-written content with decorative font, sleek formatting, and compelling images.  In a document, the content is all you have. It forces people to focus on communicating their ideas as clearly as possible.  This focus on clarity of thought and precise language also makes working with vendors easier and more cost-effective. Vendors have access to the in-depth specifications and needs we outline in our proposal docs, so they can give us a more accurate quote.
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We spend a lot of time writing. A lot more time than most other companies probably spend.  While this is quite a commitment, the resulting searchable, traceable, public record of all significant decisions, projects, and initiatives across the organization makes it way easier to onboard and scale.  It’s easier for new teammates to learn the ropes quickly when there’s a trove of existing documentation outlining the thought process behind every significant decision made at the company.  And because all of this documentation is internally public by default, people don’t need to ping each other on Slack seeking answers or permission to access what they need. They can see what info is available and then read it, further reducing workflow interruptions and increasing efficiency.  Expanding initiatives also becomes simpler when thorough documentation is publicly available to all.
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- onboarding, wikis, documentation, decision-making,
- [note::But what are the best ways of segmenting organizational knowledge to maximize it's searchability?]

One study from Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction lab found that when you try to do two tasks at once, your performance on both tasks gets about 20 percent worse. This loss in work quality is compounded by the time expense of context-switching: it takes the average person 23 minutes to refocus after an interruption, however small. Even a Slack ping can derail productivity. And when these interruptions consist of largely directionless meetings, the time cost skyrockets. A 30-minute meeting scheduled in the middle of the day may inhibit an engineer’s ability to write clean code or a teammate’s ability to write up a proposal for a new initiative.
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