My beef with morning standup 🥩

Mornings are the premium part of the day for many people.

You wake up, get coffee, and you are fired up to tackle the most important problem of the day (provided that you’re working in an environment where you give a damn).

Instead, you check your email and keep busy on Slack because there’s a scheduled interruption at 9.30, and it’s not worth loading your brain up with “the problem space” for just over an hour of progress.

You’d want at least three because it takes an hour just to get into the zone.

So you wait for your biggest chunk of uninterrupted time to do that. And it will probably be at night when Slack is quiet and your kids are asleep.

The thing is …

Alignment is important, but it can be done:

• In the afternoon, as a quick summary of the progress you made and any blockers for tomorrow
• Async

So, if you’re overloading your team with countless planning meetings, please approve my code requests and “strategy” meetings:

It’s time to rethink that approach because it’s probably killing a lot of gains.

The trouble is, you can’t just kill the daily and expect great results.

You need a bit of passion, plenty of independence, a sense of ownership, and a clear trajectory.

A team like that will walk circles around a competitor who worships busyness and expects its members to put in 8 hours of “programming.”

P.S. What are your thoughts on developer productivity? Lemme know by writing a short reply. I read them all. ♥️

Best regards,

Taj