That's part of how recurring meetings get out of hand. They'll get scheduled as an 'easy' way to maintain a cadence when people have a busy schedule, regardless of any particular instance's necessity. If someone works with a dozen different groups, this sometimes results in evenly spaced 5 minute status updates interrupting someone's workday every half hour.
The alternative is spending all day coordinating with 10 different people's secretaries to schedule time on their calendars with them. It's much easier to cancel instances of a recurring meeting than to have to schedule each one each time.
Of course, if it's just a 5 minute status update you should just send a memo.
That's right. But I find that meeting organizers are reluctant to cancel instances of a meeting even when they don't have much to share, because they are unsure in advance if others on the meeting may have something to bring up.
I always send a "I am good to cancel today's meeting unless someone has something they would like to discuss." Takes no more effort than just cancelling.
I do that for internal meetings where the members are on the same team. But on meetings across teams or organizations, I've found things often get more socially complicated. Especially if the incentives for engagement are not aligned.
