Twelve recurring meetings and nobody remembers why half exist.
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.
Can a status meeting be replaced by writing?
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.
Twelve recurring meetings and nobody remembers why half exist.
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.
Does this still hold if I am working alone?
It gets easier, not harder. A fair share of the difficulty is coordination, and that disappears. What remains is remembering your own decisions, which is what writing them down is for.