Here’s why I hate standup meetings: they’re a colossal waste of time. Worse, they feel like work (and so no one complains).
Truly horrendous standups are not just a time waste - they slowly kill your company by mass unproductivity. And they are more common than you think.
Beyond the time spent in the meeting itself, they disrupt people’s flow both before and after. I call this the spillover. If you want to design for team efficiency, reducing spillover is essential.
Raison d’être?
At Neuralcraft, our standups serve two purposes:
- Keep everyone in the loop
- Get everyone to start working around the same time
You’d be surprised how often #2 is the real reason companies do them.
How long?
We cap standups at 15 minutes. Just because you can use all 15 doesn’t mean you should.
Mornings or evenings?
Morning standups beat evening ones. In the morning, people are fresh and ready to act. At the end of the day, everyone’s drained, distracted, and likely to forget what was said—or worse, feel burdened by a fresh to-do list with no time left.
So, which morning hour?
We wanted people to get 2 to 2.5 hours of solid work in before any interruptions. Disrupting that chunk ruins momentum.
If someone reaches the office at 9:30 am and knows there’s a 10 am standup, they’re unlikely to start anything meaningful. Why bother when you’ll be interrupted soon?
Then there’s spillover again—bathroom breaks, coffee, or a meeting that runs long. Mistime it, and you’ve set up your team to be unproductive until noon.
And don’t schedule meetings so early that people miss them or show up unprepared. That just creates more churn.
Our Decision
We found that 9:45 am works best.
People arrive by 9:30, have a few minutes to settle in, grab coffee, and then hit the standup. After that, they’re off and running.