Keep the daily standup to its 15 minutes

Type the team into the roster once. It is saved in this browser and shared with Who's Next, so you only ever keep one list. Before you start, mark whoever is out today as absent, which drops them from the rotation without deleting them.

Set the seconds per speaker from the size of the team rather than from a habit. Leave about a third of your cap for joining, handoffs and the odd question, and divide the rest by the number of people speaking. A 15 minute cap leaves ten minutes, which is 100 seconds each for six people, close to the 90 second default. Ten people means either 60 seconds each or a smaller meeting.

During the run the ring counts down for the current speaker and the bar at the top counts the whole meeting against the cap. A beep at 10 seconds gives people a chance to land their last sentence, and the second beep marks the end of the slot. Going over turns the clock amber rather than cutting anyone off. That is the moment to say you will pick it up after standup.

Use next speaker as the handoff. It records what the person actually took, so the wrap-up shows where the time went. If the same name runs long every day, the problem is not the timer, it is that their update wants to be a conversation. Move it to a follow-up and standup gets its minutes back.

Six people, 90 seconds each, a 15 minute cap. The round finishes and the wrap-up lists what everybody actually took: 1:25, 1:32, 1:18, 3:10, 1:01 and 1:44. Total reads 10:10, Cap reads 15:00, and because the total came in below the cap the third figure is labelled Under by and reads 4:50. That last number is the honest one to watch week to week, because it is what the meeting had spare for arriving, handing over and finishing.

The right-hand column on each line is the gap against the slot, with anything over it in amber: -0:05, +0:02, -0:12, +1:40, -0:29 and +0:14. Five of those are noise. One is not. The 3:10 update is 1:40 past a 90 second slot, and it alone is a third of the slack the meeting had. The line under the list names it as the longest update, which saves you reading down the column.

What to do with that is the part the tool cannot do. One person over by a minute and a half on one day is somebody who hit something worth saying. The same name at the top of that list every day is a standing agenda item wearing a standup update as a disguise, and the fix is a fifteen minute call with the two or three people it concerns rather than a shorter slot for everyone else.

Totals only count what was recorded. Pressing Reset in the middle of a round throws the round away and puts you back on the roster screen with nothing logged, so use it when you started with the wrong list rather than as a way to stop the clock.

The Order setting and the Shuffle button do different things. Order set to shuffled rearranges the lineup each time you press Start and leaves the saved roster exactly as it is, which suits a team that wants a different opener every day and does not care about the pattern. The Shuffle button rewrites the saved list itself, so the new order is what you see tomorrow and the day after until you shuffle again.

A third option is to leave the order fixed and rotate it by hand, which is what the wrap-up suggests when it names who would open tomorrow. A predictable rotation lets people know roughly when they are on, and that is worth something when the meeting is large enough that the last speaker has been waiting ten minutes.

Names are kept once. Adding one that is already on the list, in any mix of upper and lower case, changes nothing rather than creating a second entry. Marking somebody absent drops them from today's lineup only and does not survive a reload. Removing them with the cross is permanent and, because the list is the shared one, it takes them off the Who's Next wheel at the same time.