Key takeaway
A status meeting that mostly surfaces overdue tasks is catching problems days too late.
A lot of what happens in a weekly status meeting is really just late discovery: someone learns, in the meeting, that a task they were counting on is overdue. That is an expensive way to find out. An hour of everyone's time spent surfacing information that could have reached the right person the moment it became true.
Why the meeting is the wrong place to catch this
By the time an overdue task reaches a status meeting, it has usually been overdue for days. The meeting is not catching the problem early, it is catching it late and then spending a room full of people's time discussing what to do about it. A direct nudge to the owner, the day it becomes overdue, catches the same problem at a fraction of the cost and often before anyone downstream has even noticed.
What that leaves the meeting to actually do
When overdue tasks are handled automatically between the owner and the tool, the status meeting is freed up to do the thing it is actually good for: deciding what to do about a real risk, not reading a list of due dates out loud. A short daily reminder email to whoever owns an open, overdue task is a small feature with a disproportionate effect on how a team's time gets spent.