Marko Anastasov wrote this on February 1, 2013
The routine of standups
At Rendered Text we do standups every morning. It’s a bit of a ritual: you come to work, meet your coworkers, and think about what you’re going to do that day.
Being a company with some freedom to choose its clients, and that now also lives off its own product, every day is completely different. For the creative folks, it is a true blessing and I personally try to never forget that.
A standup consists of three parts that describe:
- what you accomplished the previous day, along with any interesting details
- what you have not managed to do, if anything
- what you are planning to do on that day
Our standups are written. It is not that we don’t discuss things we’re working on - we do that whenever it’s necessary. Miloš is working remotely, but even if we were all in the same space we’d still be writing them.
The act of writing a standup implies a deeper thought process that is useful for a mind worker on many levels. Depending on the current situation, it may be that it helps to better recall the details and lessons of yesterday’s work. It may help you draw a roadmap through a menacing pile of tasks and todos that seem to have appeared out of the blue. Or it simply helps you zone in to the day.
A written standup is also a written promise, first to yourself and then to the team, of what you’re planning to do for that day. Over time, it makes you more aware of your abilities and able to quantify with high precision what can be done in a given time/problem space. And it keeps everybody in the loop of what’s going on all projects.
