What If Multiple Standups Took Zero Meetings?

It's 9:00 and you're in the platform standup. At 9:30 it's payments. At 10:15, the mobile team.

Three standups, fifteen minutes each. On paper that's 45 minutes. In practice it's your whole morning, because nothing real gets started in the gaps between them.

If you sit on more than one team, you already know this. Multiple standups pile up at the top of your day, one for every team you join. Nobody planned it that way. Each team just runs its own standup, at the time that works for that team.

Why Multiple Standups Cost More Than Their Minutes

The calendar shows three short meetings. It doesn't show what happens around them.

The twenty minutes between the platform and payments standups isn't long enough to start anything hard, so it fills with email. The fifteen minutes before mobile goes the same way. By 10:30 you've been "working" for an hour and a half and haven't opened the thing you're actually responsible for.

This lines up with what the research keeps finding. Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index report on the "infinite workday" found that half of all meetings land between 9 and 11 a.m. or 1 and 3 p.m., which are the hours most people would otherwise use for focused work. Hubstaff's 2026 benchmarks found the average person spends just 39% of their tracked time in deep focus, and managers spend about nine hours a week in meetings.

Stack three standups into one morning and you're adding to the problem from both ends.

Most of Each Standup Isn't for You

Here's the part that stings. In each of those three meetings, you probably need one or two updates. The rest are for other people.

The platform engineer explaining a migration doesn't need you there. You need to know if the migration affects payments. In a live standup, the only way to find out is to sit through all of it and wait for your turn.

So you listen to eight updates to hear one. Then you do it again at 9:30, and again at 10:15. Asana's guide to context switching, drawing on its Anatomy of Work research, puts the average at 9 apps a day that workers switch between. Three back-to-back team contexts before lunch is the same problem in meeting form.

Run Multiple Standups Without the Meetings

Dropping out of a team's standup doesn't work. Those teams still need to know what you're doing, and you still need to know what they're doing.

What you can drop is the meeting.

Standup Alice runs a separate standup for each team in your organization. Platform, payments and mobile each get their own questions and their own channel. People who work across several teams are part of each one.

You answer each team's check-in in a direct message, on your schedule. Maybe that's the moment you open Slack. Maybe it's after you finish the first real task of the day. Either way, it's a couple of short answers instead of a 15-minute call.

Each team gets its summary in its own channel at the time it set, threaded by person. You read the threads you care about and skip the rest. The migration update is there if you need it, and it isn't blocking your morning if you don't.

Ask Each Team What It Actually Needs

When every team runs the same three default questions, the person on three teams writes the same answer three times.

Alice lets you set different questions for each standup. The platform team might want "What are you deploying today?" Payments might care more about "Anything that touches billing?"

Now each answer is short and specific, and you're not copying one update into three channels.

If You Manage More Than One Team

Managers get hit hardest here. If three teams report to you, you're either in multiple standups every morning or you're missing what's happening on two of them.

Alice can send each team's summary to more than one place, including your email. You get every team's update in one inbox without attending any of the meetings. When something needs you, reply in that person's thread.

Start With Your Heaviest Morning

Look at your calendar for tomorrow and count the standups. If you have multiple standups, pick the team with the most people and move that standup to async first. See what you do with the time you get back.

Try Standup Alice free and set up your first team in a few minutes.