The short version
- A written standup replaces a daily meeting with a daily post. It works for about six weeks and then becomes a performance of activity.
- The drift happens because the three classic prompts ask what you did, and what you did is not what anyone needs.
- Keep two lines: what changed, and what is waiting on whom. Drop yesterday and today entirely.
- If nobody reads the posts, the format is not the problem. Nobody needed a broadcast, they needed to be able to ask.
What an async standup is
An async standup replaces the daily meeting with a written post, usually in a chat channel, often prompted by a bot at a set time. People answer the same three questions the meeting asked: what did you do yesterday, what will you do today, what is in your way.
The appeal is obvious for distributed teams. Nobody has to be awake at the same time, the record persists, and the fifteen minute meeting that ran to thirty stops eating a slot that was bad for at least one time zone.
It is a real improvement over a cross zone daily call. It is also, in most teams, the version of a good idea that decays fastest.
Why it drifts into theatre
Watch a team's channel across three months. Week one, the posts are specific and short. Week six, they are longer and vaguer. Week twelve they read like this:
"Yesterday: continued on the reporting work, some meetings. Today: more reporting, catching up on reviews. Blockers: none."
That post contains nothing. It took four minutes to write and it will be read by nobody. Three causes.
- The questions ask about activity. "What did you do" produces a list of effort. Nobody needed to know about effort, they needed to know whether something is going to land.
- The audience is unclear. Written for everyone, so written for nobody, so written to look reasonable. That is the definition of theatre.
- "Blockers: none" is the safe answer. Naming a blocker means naming a person, which feels like a complaint, so the field that mattered most goes empty.
The two line format
Cut it to two prompts and delete the rest.
| Line | Good | Bad |
|---|---|---|
| What changed | "Export is now running nightly in staging. Still fails on accounts over 50k rows." | "Worked on the export." |
| What is waiting on whom | "Waiting on Lena since Tuesday for the DNS change. Blocks release." | "Blockers: none." |
What changed is a statement about the world, which is checkable and therefore honest. What you did is a statement about yourself, which is not.
The second line needs the team to agree, once and out loud, that naming a person is routing rather than blame. Without that agreement the field stays empty and you are back to theatre. See a blocker is a question with a sleeping owner.
Drop "what I will do today" entirely. Nobody acts on it, it is frequently wrong by lunchtime, and it is the line that most encourages writing to look busy.
When nobody reads it
Here is the uncomfortable finding most teams reach around month three: the posts are fine and nobody reads them.
That is not a discipline failure. It is evidence that a broadcast was the wrong shape. People do not want a daily digest of everyone's work. They want, at a specific moment on a specific Tuesday, to know where one thing stands, and they want it then rather than in a post from nine days ago they would have to scroll for.
So the useful version is a record you can ask rather than a feed you must read. This is what StandIn is built for. At the end of the day, each person spends about ninety seconds on a brief, mostly drafted from the work that already happened: what moved, what is open, what is blocked, what is next. Nobody is asked to read it. When a colleague needs to know where something stands, they ask, and the answer comes from that brief in the person's words with a source under it. It never guesses, and when the answer is not there it says so and names who to ask. See how it works and beyond the standup bot.
Common Questions
What time should the written standup be due?
End of each person's day rather than the start. An end of day post describes what is actually true. A morning post describes intentions, which are cheap.
Should managers reply to every post?
No. Replying to everything turns it into a report to a manager, which changes what people write within a fortnight. Reply when there is a blocker to clear.
Do we still need any live standup?
For a team in one or two adjacent zones working on one thing, a short live standup is genuinely useful. Across three zones it is a meeting that is bad for someone every single day. See replacing the daily standup.
Is a standup bot worth it?
The prompt helps at the start and does nothing about the drift, because the drift is caused by the questions. Change the questions before changing the tool. See async standup tools compared.
When you're off, your StandIn is on.
It answers your teammates' questions from work you've already done, in your words, with a source under every answer.