Every ‘just checking in’ message is a symptom of the same root problem: somebody does not know where things stand. The DM is not the disease. It is the fever. And most teams treat the fever by responding faster rather than addressing the underlying information gap. We spent six months refining a simple 10-minute handoff ritual that replaced 80% of those follow-up pings, and the productivity gain was not subtle. Our team of 12 collectively saved an estimated 9 hours per week, time that had been leaking into status-chasing threads nobody enjoyed writing or reading.
Lara Hogan, engineering leadership coach and author of Resilient Management, has long advocated for structured handoff moments as a replacement for ad-hoc check-ins. Jason Fried, co-founder of 37signals, echoes the philosophy: if people keep asking for updates, the system is broken, not the people. The shared lesson is that most status anxiety comes from format failure, not performance failure. The tradeoff is that a handoff ritual requires everyone to show up prepared for those 10 minutes, which means building a small habit that some team members initially resist.
Define what ‘done’ looks like before handing anything off
The most common reason for a ‘just checking in’ DM is ambiguity about whether something is actually finished. Before you hand a task to the next person, write one sentence that describes the completion state: ‘The draft is in Google Docs with all data tables populated and ready for your copy edits.’ That single sentence eliminates the gray zone between ‘I think it is done’ and ‘I need to verify with five follow-up questions.’
This draws from the concept of a Definition of Done in agile frameworks, but you do not need to be running sprints to use it. Any collaborative workflow benefits from explicit completion criteria. The alternative, leaving done undefined, is what creates the anxiety loop: Person A thinks they are finished, Person B is not sure, Person B sends a DM, Person A feels micromanaged. One sentence at the handoff prevents it all.
Schedule the handoff as a recurring 10-minute calendar event
Put it on the shared team calendar as a non-negotiable 10-minute block. Not a meeting request with an agenda and a Zoom link. Just a calendar hold that signals: this is when handoffs happen. We found that 10 minutes is the sweet spot. Less than that feels rushed. More than that, and you drift into a status meeting, which is exactly what you are trying to avoid.
The key is consistency. When handoffs happen at the same time every day (ours was 9:15 AM), people stop wondering when they will hear back. The anxiety that fuels most check-in DMs is temporal: ‘When will I know?’ Answering that question once, by making it a calendar fixture, removes the need to ask it again. If your team spans time zones, pick the overlap window and keep it sacred.
Use a shared doc, not a message thread, as the handoff surface
Create a single running document. We used a simple table in Notion, where each row represents an active handoff: task name, owner, status, and next action. When you complete your portion, update the row. When the next person picks it up, they check the doc first. If the doc is current, there is nothing to ask about. The DM becomes unnecessary.
Message threads fail as handoff surfaces because they are sequential and hard to scan. A table is spatial. You can see every active handoff at a glance without scrolling through 40 messages to find the latest status. Claire Hughes Johnson, former Stripe COO, describes this pattern in Scaling People as creating a ‘single source of truth’ that absorbs the questions before they are asked. The initial setup takes about 20 minutes. The daily maintenance takes under two.
Name blockers out loud, not in a DM later
If you are stuck, say so during the handoff. Not after, in a private message that only one person sees. The 10-minute window exists specifically so blockers surface early and get resolved with everyone present. We added a simple prompt to our handoff: ‘Is anything slowing you down right now?’ and that question alone uncovered issues that would have festered for a full day before someone worked up the nerve to raise them.
The reason people DM blockers privately rather than raise them publicly is usually social risk. They do not want to look stuck. But a structured moment for vulnerability normalizes it. When everyone answers the blocker question in turn, admitting a problem becomes routine rather than exceptional. Over time, this is what actually builds psychological safety, not trust falls or icebreakers.
End every handoff with one clear next owner
The last thing you say in the handoff should be a name: ‘Alright, this is with Sarah until tomorrow’s handoff.’ If there is no clear next owner, the task drifts, and drifting tasks generate check-in DMs like clockwork. Naming the owner is not about hierarchy. It is about eliminating the bystander effect, where everyone assumes someone else is on it.
Research on team coordination from Stanford’s d.school consistently shows that explicit ownership assignments outperform implicit ones by a wide margin. The word ‘someone’ in a meeting always means ‘no one.’ The phrase “Sarah, by 3 PM Thursday” means the task gets done. Make the name and the deadline part of the handoff ritual, and watch how many fewer DMs you send this week.
Automate the reminder so you do not have to be the nag
Set up a simple automation, Slack’s Workflow Builder, or a Zapier trigger connected to your handoff doc, that pings the next owner when a task moves to their column. The notification comes from the system, not from a person. This matters more than it sounds. Being the person who always sends the follow-up DM is socially exhausting and breeds resentment. Letting a bot handle it removes all interpersonal friction.
Automation is not about replacing human communication. It is about removing the communication that nobody enjoys. Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, has described how his company’s distributed teams rely on automated nudges to keep async workflows moving without anyone playing the role of the ‘status cop.’ The setup takes 30 minutes once. The relief is permanent.
Review the handoff format monthly and cut what is not working
No process survives contact with reality without periodic adjustment. Once a month, spend 15 minutes asking the team: is the handoff still solving the problem? Are check-in DMs actually decreasing? Are there new friction points? We learned this the hard way when our handoff doc grew bloated with columns nobody updated, which quietly undermined trust in the whole system.
The willingness to edit your own process is what separates teams that stay productive from teams that just add more process on top of broken process. If something in the handoff is not earning its place, remove it. If a new pain point emerges, add a lightweight fix and test it for two weeks. The goal is a living system, not a frozen one. Keep it lean, and it will keep working.
The Bottom Line
The ‘just checking in’ DM is never going to disappear completely, and not everyone is a sign of dysfunction. But when your team sends dozens of them daily, the system is leaking. A 10-minute handoff ritual with a clear doc, named owners, and surfaced blockers plugs those leaks at the source. Start tomorrow. Put 10 minutes on the calendar, open a shared table, and watch how much quieter your DMs get over the next week.
Image Credit: Photo by Vlada Karpovich; Pexels
Deanna Ritchie
Editor-in-Chief at Calendar. Former Editor-in-Chief, ReadWrite, Editor-in-Chief and writer at Startup Grind. Freelance editor at Entrepreneur.com. Deanna loves to help build startups, and guide them to discover the business value of their online content and social media marketing.