Team

Async standup

A standing board where everyone writes their own update: yesterday, today, blockers. Post when your day starts, read the board when it suits you, and keep the live meeting for the things that genuinely need one.

Start

Create a board and send the link to your team. Keep the link: this one is meant to be bookmarked and reused every day, not thrown away after a session.

How to run a standup nobody has to attend

The daily standup exists to surface two things: what is moving and what is stuck. Neither needs everyone in the same call at the same minute. Writing the update costs the author a couple of minutes and costs the reader nothing, while a fifteen minute meeting for six people costs an hour and a half of team time plus the focus lost on either side of it. Async also fixes the timezone problem: there is no hour that is fair to Lisbon, Bangalore and San Francisco at once, so stop looking for one.

The blocker strip at the top of the board is the part that matters. Everything else is a log, useful for context and for catching up after a day off, but it is not why you read the board. Scan the blockers, reply to the ones you can unblock, and get on with your day. If a blocker needs a conversation, start a call with the two or three people involved instead of putting it in front of the whole team tomorrow morning.

Keep the updates short and concrete. "Fixed the retry loop in the importer, today I am on the deploy script" tells a teammate something. "Worked on the importer, continuing today" does not, and after a week of it people stop reading the board, which is how async standups die.

An honest note on identity

There are no accounts here. Your name and avatar live in this browser only, which is what keeps the tool free of sign-ups, but it has a real consequence: a teammate who opens the board on their laptop and then on their phone arrives as two different people, and clearing browser data has the same effect. They will show up as a new person on the member strip until they post again under that identity.

For a small team that already knows who is who, this is fine. The board is a shared scratchpad, not an audit trail, and it should never be used as evidence of who did or did not report on a given day. Anyone with the link can post under any name, and only the last seven days are kept. If you need attribution you can rely on, you need a tool with logins, and you should be honest with your team about which of the two you are running.

Frequently asked questions

What happens if I post twice in one day?

The second post replaces the first. Entries are keyed by person and date, so the board always shows one card per person per day and the timestamp tells everyone how fresh it is. Edit as often as you like during the day.

How long do updates stay on the board?

Seven days, then they drop off automatically. That is long enough to catch up after a week away and short enough that the board stays a working surface rather than an archive. If you need a record, paste the week into your own notes before it rolls off.

Who counts as not having posted today?

Anyone the board has seen in the last seven days who has no entry for today. It is based on people who opened the board, not on a roster you configure, so a teammate on holiday quietly disappears from the list after a week instead of being flagged every morning.

Does the board expire like the other room tools?

Not in practice. Most rooms here are wiped two hours after the last activity because they exist for one session. A standup board is a standing link, so it is kept for two weeks of complete silence and every post pushes that back. A team using it daily can bookmark the link and forget about it.

Can we still hold a live standup?

Yes, and some teams do both: written updates on the board, plus a short call once or twice a week for the conversations that are genuinely better spoken. The point is not to ban meetings, it is to stop paying for one every morning to read out information that reads faster than it speaks.