A status meeting is expensive when most of it is spent asking people to repeat facts they already shared somewhere else.
The solution is not necessarily to eliminate meetings. It's to stop using meetings as the only reliable way to reconstruct what happened.
Make updates small and specific
Ask contributors to report meaningful changes: work completed, a newly discovered blocker, a shifted date, or a decision that affects the next step. “Still working on it” may be honest, but it rarely helps someone understand the project.
Preserve context between updates
If a dependency was blocked on Monday and resolved on Wednesday, the project record should reflect both events and the current state. A chronological chat log alone makes that hard to see—status and progress are different things.
Separate information gathering from decisions
Use asynchronous updates for facts. Keep meetings for trade-offs, decisions, disagreements and work that genuinely benefits from discussion.
Don't confuse fewer meetings with no accountability
Someone still needs to own a task, clarify ambiguous updates and decide what to do about a risk. Better software—like updates-first project management—reduces administrative work; it doesn't remove responsibility.
An updates-first tool can help
Toward uses natural-language updates to maintain project information and surface blockers and progress. Team members can submit updates through Toward Capture, or from a connected Slack workspace.
A good trial is one project over several update cycles. See whether the project lead spends less time asking “What's the status?” and more time resolving what is actually holding the work up.