When You Have to Cut Your Standups Do This

The daily standup was supposed to be short. Fifteen minutes, tops. But somewhere between good intentions and real life, most standups drifted to 25 or 30 minutes of meandering updates that should have been shared in a doc. Multiply that overage across a five-person team for a full quarter, and you are looking at roughly 100 hours of lost deep work. The standup is not the problem. The lack of constraints is. With a few structural changes, you can run a meaningful standup in 8 minutes flat and actually make it the most useful meeting of the day.

• Jason Fried, co-founder of 37signals, has argued that most standups are ‘performative status reports that no one asked for.’
• Geir Amsjø, an agile coach and co-author of several Scrum guides, takes a more moderate view: standups work when they are ruthlessly time-boxed and focused on blockers, not accomplishments. The consensus is that the meeting itself has value, but only when it earns its place on the calendar with discipline and structure. The tradeoff is that tight standups require preparation from every participant, which not every team is initially willing to do.

1. Replace ‘what I did yesterday’ with ‘what is my one blocker’

The classic three-question standup format (what did you do, what will you do, any blockers) invites storytelling. People recap their entire day because the format requires it. Flip the script: open with blockers only. If someone has no blocker, they say ‘clear,’ and the group moves on. This single change can cut your standup time in half by eliminating the recapping nobody actually needs to hear live.

The reasoning is simple. Updates are informational. Blockers are actionable. A meeting built around information transfer is better handled asynchronously. A meeting built around unblocking people requires real-time human interaction. When you restructure the standup around action, every second of the meeting earns its cost. Teams that adopt blocker-first standups often report that the meeting actually feels more valuable even though it is shorter.

2. Set a visible 90-second timer per person

Use a shared screen timer or a simple phone timer set to 90 seconds. When it beeps, the current speaker wraps their thought, and the next person starts. This is not about cutting people off. It is about creating a shared expectation that changes how people prepare. When you know you have 90 seconds, you show up with your point ready. When you have unlimited time, you figure out your point as you talk.

Parkinson’s Law applies to speaking as much as it applies to project timelines.

• Steven Rogelberg, author of The Surprising Science of Meetings, found that time-boxed speaking windows improve both perceived meeting quality and information retention. The timer makes the constraint visible and shared, which removes the social awkwardness of one person trying to rush another. Everyone plays by the same rules.

3. Post updates in a shared channel before the standup starts

Have every team member post a 2-sentence update in a dedicated Slack or Teams channel 10 minutes before the standup. Format: what you shipped and what you are working on next. When the meeting starts, everyone has already read the updates. The live meeting then becomes 100% about discussing blockers and making decisions, not reciting what people already know.

This hybrid approach, sometimes called an async-first standup, was popularized by distributed teams at companies like GitLab and Automattic. A study published by the Harvard Business School found that teams adopting pre-meeting async updates reduced meeting duration by 30% on average while improving participant satisfaction. The 10-minute investment in writing prevents 15 minutes of unnecessary talking.

4. Designate a facilitator who keeps the clock

Rotate a facilitator role weekly. Their only job is to start the meeting on time, enforce the 90-second windows, redirect tangents with ‘let’s take that offline,’ and close the meeting the moment the last person finishes. Without a facilitator, standups drift because nobody feels authorized to cut the conversation short, especially when a senior person is the one going long.

The facilitator role works because it externalizes the discipline. Instead of relying on individual self-regulation, which is unreliable across a diverse team, you create a structural role that anyone can fill.

• Esther Derby, co-author of Agile Retrospectives, recommends rotating the role precisely because it builds shared ownership of the meeting format. When everyone has been the facilitator, everyone understands the constraints.

5. Kill the standup on days when there is nothing to unblock

If the pre-meeting async updates reveal zero blockers, cancel the standup. Send a message: ‘No blockers today. Standup canceled. Shipping.’ This might feel radical, but the fastest way to earn a team’s respect for a recurring meeting is to cancel it when it is not needed. It proves that the meeting exists to serve the team, not the other way around.

• Sahil Lavingia, CEO of Gumroad, eliminated almost all recurring meetings and found that the meetings that survived were the ones teams actively requested. The principle scales down to a daily standup. When you demonstrate that the meeting can be canceled, attendance and engagement improve on the days it does happen. People show up knowing the meeting would not exist unless it was needed. That is a powerful reframe.

6. Move detailed discussions to a parking lot with a 24-hour deadline

When a topic comes up that needs more than 90 seconds, the facilitator writes it on a parking lot list (a pinned message, a shared doc, or a whiteboard) and assigns an owner and a 24-hour deadline to resolve it. This keeps the standup short without losing important discussions. The deadline ensures the parking lot does not become a graveyard of unresolved items.

The parking lot technique is one of the oldest facilitation tools in meeting management, and it works because it separates identification from resolution. You do not need the full group to resolve most issues. You just need the full group to know the issue exists. Research from MIT’s Human Dynamics Lab showed that the most effective teams have short group sessions for alignment and small-group breakouts for problem-solving. The parking lot creates that structure naturally.

7. Measure your standup time for two weeks and publish the results

Track the actual duration of every standup for 10 consecutive workdays. Share the results with the team. Most teams overestimate how short their standups are. When you show the data, ‘our 15-minute standup is actually averaging 23 minutes,’ the gap between intention and reality becomes impossible to ignore, and the motivation to fix it becomes shared.

This is a direct application of the Hawthorne Effect: people modify their behavior when they know it is being measured. But unlike many management interventions, this one is transparent and team-owned. You are not surveilling anyone. You are publishing a shared metric that everyone can influence. Start a simple spreadsheet, record the start and end time each day, and review it in your next weekly planning session. The data will do the persuading for you.

The Bottom Line

An 8-minute standup is not about rushing through a ritual. It is about designing the ritual so well that 8 minutes is all you need. Start with one change: switch from the three-question format to a blocker-first approach and set a visible timer. Measure your results for two weeks. When the standup gets shorter and more useful at the same time, your team will never want to go back to the 25-minute version.

Image credit: Ahmed Akeri; Pexels