Meetings are one type of forcing function. Anything with concrete, time-bound deliverables is a forcing function, too. In a well-managed organization with trained & competent staff, it should not require meetings to ensure progress.

"It’s easy for long-term strategic, high-impact work to sink to the bottom of everyone’s todo list."

"[...] But one where the tasks to accomplish the project are not anyone’s full-time job."

Sounds like the organization's leadership are incapable of balancing short term and long term goals, and it's falling to people who are paid less to "step up" and try to swim against the current for the good of the company.

or

Whatever the author is talking about is some engineering pipe dream disconnected from actual business value, and someone is dragging a bunch of other people semi-willingly along trying to execute on it without a mandate/funding from leadership.

Impossible to say which from the outside. But I've known several instances of both cases.

Lost me at the start:

"A recurring meeting serves as a powerful forcing function for long-running projects."

No it doesn't. It serves as a burden ball that gets kicked around on the calendar field once the value of the series has been tapped out but no one wants to cancel it.

No way, this is terrible! There are so many great work tracking tools to use or more efficient ways to communicate that accomplish the same thing. Without making a bunch of people take time out of their day so you can ask them if they remembered to do part of their job. Good management creates systems so this kind of thing isn’t needed.

Engineers: All a meeting does is distract from work.

Every leader ever: if we could do the right work, we could have less meetings.

I agree with the sentiment. And also understand the rage you’ll get.

"I didn't work on this because I was taking care of {something else}" kinda nullifies your forcing function, no?

To get the mathematical analogy back off track, some meeting series are "off-resonance" and result in lower amplitude. I'd have titled this "Weekly Meetings are Motivational".