Cutting a team from twelve meetings a week

Cancel them all for two weeks and let people re-request what they miss. Roughly a third never come back, a third return shorter, and the remainder turn out to be the ones doing real work. Trimming them one at a time never produces that clarity.

Usually, if the writing is prompt and someone reads it. The failure mode is a written update nobody responds to, which is worse than the meeting because it has all of the cost and none of the acknowledgement.