Ten minutes on Monday: a standup people actually read

Every async standup starts the same way. Week one is thorough. Week three is three bullet points. Week six is a thread nobody opens. The failure is almost never discipline, it is that people are asked to type things a machine already knows.

Split the update in two

What shipped, what moved, and what is waiting on review are all facts your provider already holds. Generating that half automatically takes the writing time down to about ninety seconds, which is short enough that it survives a busy week.

The half that needs a person is the half that has no signal behind it. What are you stuck on, what did you learn, what decision needs someone else. Those three prompts are the entire human contribution, and they are the only part anyone reads twice.

Keep it to one screen

If the standup scrolls, it stops being a standup and becomes a log. Cap it. A digest that fits on one screen gets read at breakfast; one that does not gets archived unread, and then the practice quietly dies.

Our own team runs this at 9:40 on Monday. It takes ten minutes across five people, and the only rule is that nobody writes a line the repository could have written for them.

What the machine half looks like

Ours is five lines, generated, and identical in shape every week: merged this week, open and waiting, deployed and where, anything that broke, and the health score with its delta. Nobody writes it and nobody edits it — the moment a generated section becomes editable, someone starts editing it, and then it is a written update again.

The delta matters more than the number. “Seventy-two, down nine” starts a conversation. “Seventy-two” does not.

What the human half looks like

Three prompts, answered in a sentence each. What are you stuck on. What did you learn that someone else should know. What are you about to do that you would like to be talked out of.

The third one is the one people skip and the one that pays for the meeting. It is the only place in a normal week where someone can say “I am about to spend four days on this” and have a colleague say “you do not have to”.

The half a repository can write is the half nobody reads. The half that needs a person is three sentences long.

Rules that keep it short

No status colours. Green, amber and red invite a negotiation about which one applies, and the negotiation takes longer than the update.

No recap of last week. If something matters and it did not move, it appears in the generated half as still open, which is a more honest reminder than a person re-typing it.

No attendance requirement. Someone with nothing to say writes nothing, and that is information too. A person who writes nothing three weeks running is a conversation, not a policy violation.

How it fails

It fails in exactly one way: someone starts writing paragraphs. Usually because something went wrong and they feel they owe the team a full explanation. That is a real need, and the standup is the wrong place for it. The fix is a link to somewhere longer, not a longer standup.

We have had two of those in the last year. Both times the paragraph became a post here.