We default to meetings because they feel like work when often they're just a more exhausting way to transfer information that deserves to live somewhere permanent.

Meanwhile the document would have let people read at their own pace, reference it later without asking, and skip the parts that don't concern them.

Then someone asks a question that derails everything for ten minutes, then someone else needs to leave early, then you schedule a follow-up to cover what you didn't finish covering.

Writing it down feels like overkill when everything is fresh. Not writing it down feels like sabotage when you're the one asking "what did I mean by this" to absolutely no one at 11pm on a Sunday.

Then the moment passes and we spend hours reconstructing our own thinking from scattered clues like archaeologists excavating our own incompetence.

We convince ourselves we'll remember why we made every decision and how every process works because it all feels so obvious in the moment.

The math never makes sense for not documenting. We just convince ourselves that writing it down is a big project requiring proper formatting and approval workflows when really it's just putting the answer somewhere findable instead of somewhere forgettable.

By month three you've spent more time answering than documenting would have cost you. By month six you've developed a pavlovian stress response to notification sounds because you know it's probably that question again.

The best HR teams I've worked with treat documentation like infrastructure, not paperwork. They write policies people can actually understand, which means fewer emails, meetings, and fewer moments where someone quietly does the wrong thing because asking felt like too much effort

They spend hours every week answering things that should be answered once in a document nobody has to hunt for. Instead the policy lives in a PDF from 2019 buried in a shared drive that requires three levels of permission to access.

Senior ones know their value is in documentation that outlives their engagement.

He wasn't being difficult. He was being efficient with his $500/hour time and respecting ours by giving us something we could reference forever instead of a conversation we'd forget by Thursday.
Junior consultants love long meetings because that's how they prove value.

Then I realized he'd already written everything down before we even asked. Every process, every edge case was documented in excruciating detail.

We call this dedication when it's actually just a single point of failure who happens to have a coffee addiction and a martyr complex.

Hustle culture celebrates 18-hour days but nobody asks why they're necessary. Usually it's because nothing is written down, everything lives in the founder's head, and the team can't function without them.