Traditional daily standups represent an outdated and ineffective way to think about team communication.
Real-time standups:
- Interrupt deep work — breaking flow to hop on a call costs builders time and focus, especially before and after the standup when they’re forced to context switch.
- Aren’t remote-friendly — it’s hard to catch up if someone misses the meeting. Without disciplined note-taking, people miss important context about projects.
- Devolve into decision-making and tangents — it’s too easy for a standup to veer off track and become a place where teams try to make real-time decisions. This fragments the conversation, may not be relevant for everyone on the call, and makes it hard to find decisions later.
Standups for distributed teams
We’ve been iterating on our daily standup format at Campsite over the past year and found a system that protects everyone’s time and flow while maximizing visibility and shared context:
- A recurring Zapier automation creates a post every day with a simple prompt: What did you work on today?
- At the end of each person’s workday, we write a short comment on the post; it's usually a few sentences or bullet points.
- Comments include links to relevant posts, call summaries, pull requests, and tasks so that people can get more context if needed.
Here’s a real example of a daily update to see how these feel: Daily Update August 14, 2024.
This system has helped us move faster as a distributed team:
- Supports deep work — daily updates never interrupt our flow. When people share at the end of their workday, updates are always reflective of a full day’s progress regardless of time zone.
- Remote-friendly — if someone is out for a day, it’s easy to catch up. All the context for each day is one place so there’s no need to hop through channels to re-read long chat threads.
- Focused on impact — sharing at the end of the day keeps us focused on what actually happened, not what we thought would happen.
- Easy to skim — it’s faster to skim a few comments than to sit through a long-winded meeting. Short, info-dense, context-rich comments let people deep-dive into code or separate conversations if needed.
- Thoughtful side-conversations — nested comments give us space to ask follow-up questions or share additional context. Sometimes, these side conversations spawn new posts to keep our communication organized.
- Updates double as a “signing off” message — end-of-day updates give our distributed team a sense of people’s availability and presence.
- Self-documenting and transparent — keeping everything in posts and comments means that daily updates become a log of our progress. Information doesn’t get siloed in private meeting notes or a had-to-be-there chat thread.
Campsite posts, nested comments, and Zapier integration make this system easy to implement for any distributed team — give it a try.
