We timed standups across several projects for a few months out of curiosity, mostly to settle an internal argument about whether the format was the problem or the people were. The format was the problem, but not in the way either side expected.
What actually costs time
The single biggest time sink was not status updates, it was live problem-solving — someone raises a blocker and the room tries to fix it there, with everyone else waiting. Meetings that stayed under ten minutes were the ones with a hard rule: blockers get named, not solved, in the room.
- Named, not solved — a blocker gets a one-sentence description and an owner for the follow-up conversation.
- Yesterday's plan versus today's plan — not a list of tasks completed, which turns into a status report nobody needs.
- Anything blocking someone else — the only reason a standup needs to be synchronous at all.
What looked expensive but wasn't
Going around the room in a fixed order, one person at a time, felt slow in theory. In practice it added under a minute to a ten-person meeting and removed the far more expensive habit of two people talking over each other and re-covering ground.
What we dropped
The "anything else" round at the end. It reliably turned into either silence or a second meeting. Anything that belongs there belongs in a message afterwards, where it can include detail a stand-up format discourages.
A standup is a synchronisation point, not a status report. The moment it starts producing information that could have been a message, it has stopped earning its slot on the calendar.
The one case worth an exception
Teams doing exploratory or research-heavy work benefited from a slightly longer format twice a week, with room for "here is what I found" rather than "here is what I did". Forcing research into the same eleven-second slot as a routine ticket update discarded the useful part of the update.
Where this leaves us
Ten minutes, fixed order, blockers named not solved, and a written channel for everything that isn't synchronisation. Nothing novel. It is just consistently enforced, which turned out to be the entire difficulty.