Could we make this meeting an email?
I have too many meetings on my calendar.
Nothing gets done in our meetings.
This meeting is useless.
Meetings are only as useful as your meeting culture allows them to be. To be useful, meetings need an outcome, and once that outcome is met, the meeting can end. If that is actually the beginning and end of the meeting, then yes, that could definitely be an email! But sometimes there is more to it than that. Perhaps part of the purpose of a status meeting is to guarantee that the previous emails have been read. The purpose of a daily check-in can be to give a heads-down worker a known time to prepare for, rather than disruptive "stopping by."
If you feel like you're saying the things up above, I recommend doing the following:
1 - List all the meetings you have for the previous week (that way you capture any that "just came up")
2 - Identify the primary goal or outcome for each meeting
3 - Think of all the possible secondary purposes that meeting might be serving
4 - Review and look for patterns
Do you have a lot of meetings to check-in? Perhaps you aren't setting up your team members to run as independently as you thought.
Do you have a lot of meandering brainstorming meetings? You may try cutting them in half - a hard stop will often spur creativity.
If you have agendas for each meeting, are you sticking to them? Wandering off-topic could signal that there's something missing or not being addressed.
There are all sorts of patterns that could turn up in your meetings, and the first step is to look hard at what you're actually doing.
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