There's an elephant in the room, as well, which is social status. Impromptu status pings are a show of power ("this happens on my time") and often make a person

There's an elephant in the room, as well, which is social status. Impromptu status pings are a show of power ("this happens on my time") and often make a person feel subordinate and demotivated. It's only 15 minutes to recover context if motivation isn't lost, but if the impromptu meeting becomes intense and emotional, then you can lose hours. All meetings cost time at the edges (no one starts a project at 9:50 if there's a 10:00 meeting) but those that are infuriating, stupid, or otherwise unwanted probably do more damage than meetings do if they're useful and rare. Impromptu status pings, except in a production crisis or in a time-critical situation, shouldn't happen. Any status reporting infrastructure should be regular, legible, and structured and, in typical times, ought to consume no more than 15 minutes per day. As for meetings, those can be useful or worse than useless, and the problem there is that the usually higher social status of those who schedule them prevents proper feedback on the meetings that don't work or make sense. Just as there's complexity creep in code as features (whether well-thought-out) pile on and kludges and counter-kludges are thrown in, there's complexity creep in management as meetings get thrown on calendars and the people most aware of them not working don't feel comfortable pointing the fact out.