Your Meeting Needs a Google Doc

A little while ago, an engineer scheduled an early morning meeting on my calendar.

“Sync on Project X,” it read.

The invite was scheduled for an hour, and included another engineer as well as their engineering manager.

The goal of the meeting, presumably, was to talk about Project X — a project I hadn’t worked on for a few months, but was moderately well versed in.

What questions should I prepare for? I wondered. I decided to reach out to the engineer who had scheduled it.

Me: Hi! I just noticed the meeting you scheduled about Project X. I was wondering if you could share an agenda, or if I could create a google doc for you to put some questions into so I can prepare (or even answer some of the questions) in advance. Thanks!

The engineer: Oh, sure! Go for it!

Four questions ended up in the Google Doc.

I had easy answers for two of them, shared a link to some documentation and screenshots for another, and had a follow-up question for the last one. The other engineer started a comment thread tagging another engineer to follow-up on that follow-up question, which resulted in a quick back-and-forth in the thread. In its entirety, the whole time I took to write my responses and the back-and-forth probably took no more than 15 minutes.

The next morning, I woke up ready for the meeting — only to find a Slack message from the engineer: they had no more…