The status meeting is a feelings meeting
Most recurring status meetings move no information. They move anxiety.
I used to think the weekly status meeting was an information problem — people didn’t know what other people were doing, so we put everyone in a room until they did. Years of running these has convinced me that’s almost never what’s happening. The information was already in the doc. Nobody read the doc.
What the meeting actually does is regulate anxiety. The manager is anxious that work is slipping; the meeting lets them watch faces and decide it isn’t. The engineer is anxious that their work is invisible; the meeting lets them be seen saying it out loud. Once I started reading the ritual that way — as emotional maintenance wearing an operational costume — I got much better at deciding which ones to kill. You don’t kill a feelings meeting by sending a better doc. You kill it by giving the feeling somewhere else to go.
(Placeholder note — replaced when the first real journal→note ships.)