Against the status meeting.

If you have ever sat in a thirty-minute meeting where six people took two minutes each to say what they did last week, you have attended a very expensive, very slow email.

Status meetings are the default because they’re the easiest thing to book. They require no preparation, no artifact, no decision. The cost is invisible, which is different from being zero. The cost is, in fact, enormous.

Status is a read operation. It belongs in a document. Writing it forces clarity; reading it lets people batch; skipping it, when nothing’s new, is allowed. None of these things are available in a meeting. You can’t skip a meeting you’re in.

The counter-argument is always the same: but it’s how we stay connected.Fine — keep one. A fifteen-minute shared coffee. No agenda. Nothing to report. Just people. Call it what it is and let everyone decline without guilt on the weeks they don’t want it.

Everything else — the pipeline review, the ops standup, the team sync that somehow starts with a round of updates — those aren’t meetings. Those are memos that somebody didn’t want to write.