stop-slop

# Stop Holding Daily Standups Somewhere along the way, the daily standup stopped being a tool and became a ritual. Nobody remembers who decided it had to happen at 9:30 every morning, but everyone dutifully shows up, shuffles through their updates, and nods along to things they already knew. If your team has fewer than ten people, I'd argue that meeting is costing you far more than it returns. The standup was designed to solve a coordination problem: too many people working on too many interrelated things to keep track of informally. A team of six doesn't have that problem. You sit near each other, or share a Slack channel, or both. You already know that Priya is wrestling with the payment API and that Marcus is waiting on design assets. Asking everyone to recite this aloud at a fixed time is like holding a town hall to announce the weather. The real cost isn't the fifteen minutes on the calendar. It's the interruption of the two hours around them. A meeting at 9:30 makes the 9:00 hour too short to start anything deep, and the 10:00 hour a slow recovery from context-switching. Multiply that across a small team and you're burning a meaningful slice of your most productive time on status updates that a short written note could convey in seconds. Worse, the format quietly rewards performance over honesty: people say "no blockers" because raising a real problem in front of everyone feels awkward, then quietly ping a colleague afterward, which is the conversation that should have happened anyway. Small teams have a gift that large organizations would envy, which is the ability to talk to each other directly, when it matters, without ceremony. Daily standups squander it.