The Meeting-Free Week: What Happened When Our Team Stopped Having Daily Standups

For three months, our team had a daily standup that looked like this: eight people in a room, each saying what they did yesterday, what they're doing today, and whether they have blockers. Total time: 30 minutes. Every single day. That's 10 hours per week. 40 hours per month. In a year, that's two full work weeks spent exclusively in standup meetings. So we stopped. Here's what happened. The Experiment We replaced daily standups with two things: A shared async update doc — everyone writes what t