We cancelled our Monday standup in March. By August nobody could remember what it had been for.
That sentence ought to embarrass me, and it does, a little. A meeting had occupied half an hour every week for the better part of a year — a fixed cost, recurring, defended on the calendar like a load-bearing wall — and when we knocked it out, the building did not so much as creak. No project slipped. Nobody walked into a wall they didn't know was there. The meeting left exactly the size of hole that a meeting about nothing leaves, which is to say none.
I've come to think of the status meeting as a relay race. Eight people in a circle, each clutching a baton — what I did, what I'm doing, what's in my way — waiting for their turn to pass it to the next runner, who isn't really running anywhere, who is mostly just standing there holding out a hand. We called it coordination. It was a postal service with worse hours. Every baton in that circle was a piece of information that had a sender and a receiver and could, in almost every case, have simply been mailed.
That's the thing about most meetings, once you look directly at them: they exist to move information from where it is to where it needs to be. The weekly status. The handoff. The sync. The "let's get everyone on the same page." Strip away the coffee and the small talk and the ritual of it, and you find a transport problem wearing a calendar invite. We met because the information couldn't move on its own, and we were the only freight available.
For most of the history of work, that was simply true. A fact lived in one person's head, and the only way to get it into yours was to put both heads in the same room. The meeting wasn't the point. The meeting was the cost — the toll we paid because information was sticky, illiquid, trapped wherever it was first produced. We hated the toll and paid it anyway, the way you pay for shipping. There was no other way to get the package there.
The runners went home
There is now. This is the part that crept up quietly while we were all arguing about whether to come back to the office. The information has started to move itself. A pull request lands and something writes the summary — what changed, why, what it touches, who should care — and routes it to the three people who need it and nobody else. A long thread resolves and the decision falls out the bottom, cleaned up and filed, without a human transcribing it. At my company we let agents do the carrying now, the unglamorous freight-haulage of who-did-what, and the batons mostly deliver themselves. The relay still happens. The runners went home.
I should admit a bias here, because it sharpens the point rather than blunting it. I have ADHD, diagnosed late, and I have never once sat through a status meeting without some animal part of my brain trying to chew through the wall. A recitation of facts I could have read in ninety seconds, delivered at the speed of the slowest talker, is for me a uniquely refined torture. So I may have been quicker than most to notice the meetings were hollow — the way the person with the bad knee is first to feel the storm coming. But the storm is real whether your knee aches or not.
What survives the freight
Here is what I did not expect. Killing the information-transport meetings did not give us fewer meetings that mattered. It gave us a clearer view of which ones did. Because a few survived. They survived precisely because they were never really about moving information at all — we'd just been smuggling the real work inside the freight, the way you bury the thing you actually need to say at the bottom of an email about scheduling.
What survives is everything an agent can carry the facts of but cannot do the thing. The conversation where two senior people disagree about architecture and have to actually fight it out, with all the texture and ego and half-articulated intuition that a summary flattens into mush. The moment someone needs to be told, looking at their face, that the project they love is being killed. The hour where a team that's been politely avoiding a conflict finally has it. The room where trust gets built or broken, where judgment gets exercised in real time against a problem nobody has fully specified. You cannot mail any of that. There is no baton. There is only the strange, irreducible work of human beings deciding what to believe and whether to believe each other.
So the meetings aren't dying, exactly. The hollow ones are dying, and good riddance to the relay race. What's left is smaller, rarer, and considerably more uncomfortable, because you can no longer hide behind the agenda. When a meeting can't be about status anymore, it has to be about substance — about the conflict, the call, the trust — or it has no reason to put eight people in a room. The calendar gets quiet. The remaining hours get heavy.
A simple, brutal test
If you want to know which of your meetings will still exist in five years, the test is simple, and a little brutal. Ask what would break if the information just showed up where it was needed, on its own, the morning it was ready. Most of your calendar would not break. It would exhale. And the few things that would break — those are the only meetings you ever actually needed. Cancel the rest. Nobody will remember what they were for.