Note: The following is an excerpt from the Scale Smarter Newsletter.

I’m not here to explain why daily standups are important (hint: they are, and you should try them). I’m here to show you how to run them asynchronously and scale yourself to get that time back!

The case for async standups

The daily standup comes from scrum methodology and is traditionally used by engineering teams.

But I’ve stolen it from product teams I’ve worked with and applied it to other teams in ops, growth & sales. It’s a great way to create alignment and feedback loops.

The issue with a daily standup is that it interrupts the work day. Even a short, 15 minute standup meeting can take you out of flow. Research shows that after an interruption, it can take up to 25 minutes to resume the task.

By moving this meeting off the calendar and into Slack, you scale yourself (get that time back) and create autonomy on your team.

Your directs can submit their update when they have time vs having to attend another standing meeting.

The 3 questions of a daily standup

We’re going to take the same standard standup questions, and push them to Slack to be answered asynchronously:

1. What did you do yesterday?
2. What are you doing today?
3. What’s blocking you?

Set up a daily standup in a Slack channel

1. From your desktop, click your workspace name in the top left.