At Amazon we had a policy that each meeting starts with a memo and reading period. Every issue you brought up is true, but also pretty easy to get past.
> people have to read and formulate questions under time pressure
People who aren't good at that still have the option to read ahead of time. They need to know themselves to figure out which kind of person they are. They also have the option to submit feedback after the fact.
> Anyone who did read (or helped write) the documents in question is sitting around wasting their time.
Usually if you were an author or already read it, you either did your emails, wrote your next document, or just showed up after reading period. Sometimes you'd use that as your lunchtime if you WFH while you waited for people to read your doc. Or you would read the comments as they were being left on your document in real time so you could respond or do more research.
But I always managed to fill the time with something else productive. You adapt pretty quickly.
> And of course it doesn't make the meeting any shorter.
This is 100% true. It makes them longer and slows down decision making. But it also tends to mean that decisions can be made (and are recorded right in the doc!) in one meeting instead of multiple meetings, since the main thoughts are already written down.
To be clear, I'm not saying it's a good idea. I found most of the meetings run that way to be a waste, because they indexed on "every meeting starts with a document" even when it wasn't necessary. But it might be helpful to try it for one or two meetings where you are wasting a lot of time talking about things that could have been written down.
