Automating our Stand-ups (+ an AppleScript you can use)

Like most tech teams, we kick each day off with a stand-up at Geckoboard.

As we’ve grown, these have gradually become more and more hi-tech. We use Zoom so that remote team members can dial in, while those of us in the office gather in our board room for the call.

We struggled with audio quality at first, but ever since installing some sound insulation and upgrading our speakerphone to a Jabra 810, it’s been great.

However, starting stand-up every morning was a PIA! You’d need to:

• Launch Zoom
• Open our standup boards in Chrome (we use Clubhouse)
• Check Zoom was using the correct camera, microphone, and speaker
• Start a screenshare to share the standup boards
• Record

Fed up of doing this every day, we found a way to automate it using AppleScript Editor.

Now, all we need to do each day is run the script.

To use the script, if you have the same set-up as us, all you should need to do is tweak the name of the Chrome tab to whatever web page you want to load and edit your Chrome settings so that it launches your Kanban board on startup. If you’re not using Zoom, you’ll need to make wider changes, but hopefully it’s still a useful starting point. Enjoy!