Daily Meetings are Great but You Should Never Have Them

Getting everyone together face-to-face isn’t always the best way to share information.

This blog post was originally written on May 28th, 2013 and published on my previous blog. I am republishing it here on Medium as part of a migration in blogging tools. This article in particular is both dated and vindicated by the rise of asynchronous standup tools and the embrace of Slack as a communications hub for teams.

A staple of the “startup industry” is the daily standup meeting. The idea is simple and the theory is effective: let’s take time to make sure everyone is up to speed on what everyone else is doing, and that management is in the know about any potential problems. Typically these meetings follow a certain format:

• What got accomplished yesterday?
• What are you expecting to accomplish today?
• What problems are you (or your team) experiencing?

This is great information to share, because it keeps everyone well-informed and provides a regular opportunity to share issues that management can fix or that someone else on the team can provide a solution. Making this information share part of the normal daily routine helps keep things moving.

Sounds great, right? Everybody should be doing this. Why do I say that you should never have them, then?

Because it’s the information that’s great: the meetings are time-sinks.

All meetings are terrible. I don’t think this is news to anybody — meetings are a necessary evil. They’re often meandering, only sometimes productive, and they always interrupt what each and every one of the meeting participants were already doing (which, ostensibly, is what they’re getting paid to do in the first place).

Typically, people try to reconcile this fact with their need for a daily meeting by trying to enforce a strict structure. “The meeting will only last 15 minutes,” they say; “we won’t actually discuss anything, go have discussions after the meeting.” Before long, arcane rules evolve about people with stopwatches, and pigs and chickens, and the daily meetings have taken on a life of their own.

The problem I have with this is that everyone is so bent on trying to minimize the interruption factor for these meetings that they forget an important fact: the only benefit to having a meeting is the face-to-face discussion that it allows for. Or, to put it another way: if you’re structuring your meeting around trying to eliminate anything that isn’t a two-minute “this is what I did/am doing/am having trouble with” update, why are you having a meeting at all?

For the development team at Treehouse, we use a daily email thread to achieve this, and it works great. I set up a cron job that fires an email on all of our business days; the email reminds everybody to make sure that our task list is up-to-date, to do a quick review of any new code that was submitted for the site over the last day, and also asks the above three questions.

This is so much better than actually having a meeting that I don’t understand why anybody would want to do anything else. Here are all the benefits:

• The “standups” are automatically archived: we use a Google Group for our dev-related conversations, and having everybody submit their updates via email means that we get a perfect archive of what everyone was up to for free.
• The “standups” are minimally invasive: because there’s no meeting to schedule, there is no forced interruption. Everyone is just expected to respond to the email whenever they get to it in their morning routine (which, for a distributed team, means that we get responses throughout the day). Instead of dedicating 15 minutes every day for a meeting, everyone takes two minutes and writes an email. Reading the emails takes even less time, and instead of having to do it all at the same time they get to do it when they have a quick break to read their email.
• The “standups” aren’t hard: there is no stopwatch. There are no pigs and chickens. There isn’t an urge to verbally slap people on the wrist and tell them to take something “offline.” If a discussion needs to happen, then it can happen as part of the email thread. Because you don’t have to worry about whether or not people are observing the structure of the meeting, you can focus instead on the conversation.
  (A quick anecdote: I was actually in a situation where daily standup meetings were taking place, and the manager was focusing so much energy on trying to make sure everyone obeyed the rules and got through the meeting quickly, that he failed to notice that one of his team members had basically stalled for two weeks.)

Staying up to date is important, especially for a team/company that moves quickly. But if you’re moving that quickly, do you really have time to have unnecessary meetings every day? Maybe give the email method a shot and see if it works for your team. If it doesn’t, or if you think there are some benefits to having a daily face-to-face update, I’d love to hear about it.

Update: I’ve gotten a few responses along the lines of “but face-to-face communication is important,” and I agree with that wholeheartedly. At Treehouse we have a weekly developer meeting where we discuss broader strategy and company updates, and we use Google Hangouts for pretty much any discussion of substance. It’s a rare day that anyone on my team doesn’t get face-to-face interaction with me, much less other members of the team. So yes, it is valuable, and should be encouraged… but interrupting everybody every day at 9:30 to force it to happen doesn’t seem like a good management move to me.