Arthur Sterling

Arthur Sterling — Notes https://arthursterling.com/en/notes/ Short pieces by Arthur Sterling on work, words and meetings. en-GB © Arthur Sterling Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT Ready, available, approved https://arthursterling.com/en/notes/ready-available-approved/ https://arthursterling.com/en/notes/ready-available-approved/ Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT Arthur Sterling Three words that most offices treat as one. They are not, and mistaking one for another costs more than it seems. Most offices treat three words as interchangeable: ready, available and approved. They turn up in the same meeting, often in the same sentence, and nobody asks what separates them. Each describes a different state of the work, however, and swapping one for another is among the cheapest ways I know of acquiring an expensive problem. ‘Ready’ means that whoever was writing has stopped. It is the author’s verdict on their own work and, like every verdict delivered in one’s own case, it deserves courtesy and a measure of scepticism. A ready document is a draft that has stopped changing in one pair of hands. It has not yet met anyone else. ‘Available’ is a promise. It says that the thing is in a particular place and will be found there. A presentation is available when it has an address, not when it exists somewhere on somebody’s laptop. The promise concerns the future: tomorrow at nine, whoever follows that link will find that file. If the link leads to an empty folder, the promise has been broken, however sincerely it was made. ‘Approved’ is a decision, and a decision carries two things the other words can do without: a name and a date. Someone identifiable, on a given day, said yes to this version and not to another. An approval without a name is a rumour; without a date, an anecdote; without a version, a misunderstanding biding its time. The damage is done in the slippage. On Monday someone mentions in a meeting that next year’s budget is ready. A colleague hears ‘approved’ and forwards it. On Tuesday the author adjusts two figures, as was their right, since to them it was only ready. By Wednesday two budgets are in circulation, each believed final by someone, neither approved by anyone with the authority to approve it. Nobody lied. A word was merely saved. Email makes matters worse, because email lasts. A subject line reading ‘Version available’ invites everyone to treat the attachment as settled, whatever the message says about changes still to come. The subject line, unlike the message, is read by everyone. So when I am told that something is ready, I ask, politely, ready for what: to be read, to be used, or to be signed? The question takes three seconds and costs a raised eyebrow or two. The answer usually reveals that the accurate description needed two words, and that one of them was ‘nearly’. I do not ask for office language to become a legal glossary, only that the three words be kept apart, because they describe three moments that do not overlap: someone has finished, something can be found, someone has decided. Confusing them does not make the work go faster. It makes the work look further along than it is, which is not the same thing, and is usually discovered on a Thursday. The file called final https://arthursterling.com/en/notes/the-file-called-final/ https://arthursterling.com/en/notes/the-file-called-final/ Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT Arthur Sterling Why archives keep everything and return nothing, and what it takes for things to be found again. Every office archive eventually contains a file called ‘final’. It is soon joined by ‘final_v2’, then by ‘final_v2_FINAL’ and at last, in a spirit of typographical despair, by ‘final_v2_FINAL_use_this’. None of these names is untrue at the moment it is typed. All of them are untrue a week later. I do not think archives fail through laziness. They fail because a file is named when less is known about it than at any later point: the moment it is saved. Whoever types ‘final’ is expressing a hope, not describing the document. Folders go the same way. They are founded on one principle, by year or by subject, and grow according to another, until the folder called ‘Misc’ is the largest and the most consulted, which says a good deal about the candour of the rest. The result is an archive that keeps everything and returns nothing. An organisation’s memory is not the sum of what it has saved. It is what it can find in five minutes, on the day it is needed, while the one person who knew where things were is on holiday. An archive in which things can be found again asks, in my experience, for four habits. None of them is technological. The first is a fixed address. Each kind of document has one place where it lives, and that place does not move because somebody’s mood has. Copies exist, but they know they are copies. The second is an honest name. A name says what the file contains and which date it refers to, not what anyone hopes of it. ‘2026 accounts, draft for the March review’ is less stirring than ‘final’, but every word of it is true. The third is a source for every claim. A figure in a presentation ought to be able to say where it came from. If the answer is ‘somebody’s email, July, I think’, the figure is not a fact. It is a hypothesis in a good suit. The fourth is the most neglected: what has been superseded stays, but says so. Deleting old versions looks tidy; in practice it destroys the record of how a decision was reached, which is often the very thing one is looking for. It is enough for the superseded document to say so on its first line and to point to its successor. An archive that marks its old versions is an archive. One that does not is a treasure hunt without the treasure. None of this needs new software. It needs a decision, taken once, about where things live and what they are called, and the discipline to keep to it when in a hurry, which is to say always. As for the file called final, I have seen one survive three reorganisations. It is the only truly final document in the office. Nobody remembers what it is about. A meeting needs a reason https://arthursterling.com/en/notes/a-meeting-needs-a-reason/ https://arthursterling.com/en/notes/a-meeting-needs-a-reason/ Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT Arthur Sterling An objective, the right people, a decision and minutes. Without them, an email would usually have done. A meeting is an expensive instrument that presents itself as free. An hour with six people is six hours of work, plus the time it takes to get there and, afterwards, to remember what one was doing. Nobody would sign off six hours of expenditure without asking what it was for. Of a meeting, the question is seldom asked. A meeting needs a reason, and the reason can be recognised by four things that belong in the invitation before they belong on the agenda. The first is the objective, in one sentence. Not ‘alignment on the project’, which describes a mood, but ‘choose between the two delivery dates’. If the objective will not fit in a sentence, the meeting is not ready, and it is unlikely to become ready once everyone is seated in the meeting room. The second is the people needed: whoever must decide, whoever holds the information the decision depends on, whoever will carry it out. Everyone else can read the minutes, which cost less and can be consulted twice. Inviting someone ‘for information’ is a courtesy that costs them an hour; copying them into an email costs them thirty seconds. The third is the decision expected. A well-called meeting knows in advance what ought to leave the room: a yes, a no, a choice between options already set out. If at the end nobody can say what was decided, there has been no meeting. There has been a conversation, with better chairs. The fourth is the minutes, brief and sent the same day: what was decided, who does what, by when. An action without a name and a date is a wish, and wishes are not known for completing themselves. Minutes do not retell the discussion; they record its consequences. Apply these tests and a good many meetings turn out to be emails in fancy dress. If the purpose is to inform, a well-written message is quicker to read than to sit through, and it stays. If an opinion is wanted, it can be asked for in writing, with a deadline. A meeting earns its place when people must decide something on which they disagree, or probably will, and the disagreement is best aired once, aloud. One species deserves separate mention: the meeting to decide whether to hold the meeting. I have seen one convened with an agenda, a list of attendees and minutes. Its decision was to reconvene. Procedurally, it was faultless. I am not against meetings. A meeting with a reason can settle in an hour what has been open for weeks. I am against the ones that exist because there has always been a meeting at ten on Tuesdays, and everyone assumes somebody else wanted it. Before calling one, therefore, I write the subject line of the invitation as though it were the first line of the minutes. If I cannot, I send an email.