Async standups: a template that actually saved us hours a week
Daily standups eat 30 minutes and produce 3 useful data points. Here’s the async standup template we use at Clustra, why it works, and how to run it in Plan and Chat.
Every daily standup we ever ran had the same shape. Ten minutes waiting for the last person to join. Twenty minutes of "yesterday, today, blockers" that everyone had already typed into Slack ninety seconds earlier. Two minutes of actual signal. We killed live standups eighteen months ago. Here is the template that replaced them, and the reason it stuck.
The template
Every teammate posts the same three-line update in a dedicated Chat channel by 10:30 local time. Three lines, no more:
- Shipped yesterday — one concrete thing, linked to the issue or PR.
- Shipping today — one concrete thing, linked to the issue.
- Blocked / need — a person, a decision, or nothing.
Why it works
Three reasons it beats the 15-minute video call. First: the update is a written artifact — searchable, quotable, sharable outside the team. Second: the "blocked" line is where real work happens. When someone types "blocked on infra review from @sam," Sam sees it, everyone else sees it, and nobody had to wait through six unrelated updates. Third: it respects timezones. A team split across three timezones gets the same signal from the same channel, without anyone taking a call at 6 AM.
How we run it in Clustra
- 01
Create a standup channel in Chat
One channel per team, threads off. The flat surface makes the day skimmable.
- 02
Pin the template message
Copy the three lines above into a pinned message. New teammates onboard themselves.
- 03
Convert blockers into issues
If a blocker persists past two updates, one click turns the message into a Plan issue. The thread stays linked as context.
- 04
Weekly retro on friction
Every Friday, scan the week of standups. Every recurring blocker is a signal — either a process fix or a real bug.
What we tried first (and why it failed)
We tried a bot that pinged everyone with the three questions. The bot worked, the updates arrived, and nobody read them. Bot messages felt like TPS reports. Moving the format into a normal channel — where people already talked — got engagement back. The lesson: async formats live or die on whether the surface feels like a place people already are.