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Comment by thrower123 | Hacker News Reader

When the clock hits 4pm, I have a daily standup meeting. About half the time, this meeting occurs, and I go home afterwards immediately. If it doesn't happen, a quorum of people had something better to do. If I don't have anything actually urgent or interesting, I tend to bail with the others. Otherwise, I work away until maybe 5:15, then I go home.

I'm basically paid to be on-hand 9-5, so that's what I do. I don't check email outside work hours as a rule. If there's something technically interesting, or is important to do but cannot be done within the constraints of a business workday (basically, anything that involves deep thought, concentration, and sustained effort), I may choose to do it when that's convenient for me. And I know things; I remember, and I've been around long enough to know the whys and wherefores and sequences of events that led up to the present state of things.

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Not that you asked, but this sounds like a totally dumb time for this meeting.

It creates a reliable interruption, such that if it happens you're likely to be distracted enough that it isn't even worth trying to get back into serious work for 45 minutes before you need to go home.

It's also late in the day, so any tasks that come up must pass a high bar to be actually remembered and resolved. A task must either be so urgent that it is worked on immediately (and then people will resent the standup for making them stay late) or so important that it can be remembered the next day. This means a whole bunch of simple-to-fix issues are probably being ignored, either by forgetting or just not being raised in the first place.

I'm not surprised that the meeting often doesn't happen. A better time for a standup is before lunch or earlier in the morning.

I haven't found an actually good time to have these kinds of standup meetings.

First thing in the morning is not good, because it requires people get in in time, and so it becomes a gate on starting work if you are on time until the latest person arrives. Also kind of useless to do until the morning email triage is completed.

Midday doesn't work, I've found, because it is impossible to carve out a consistent time to meet. External sources always try to clutter up 10-2 with calls and meetings that involve herding cats and aligning schedules over which there is little control. Also tends to blow into lunch time and people get hangry and cranky.

End of the day at least serves as a terminus to the day, and since standups are mostly useless, skipping it to sneak out and play golf or whatever tends to be a common outcome.

What you're describing is a workplace with a generally broken approach to meetings. The best thing you can do with standup in this environment may be to eliminate it, or minimize it as you've described. But there is often a place for a standup meeting in many work environments, and barring the other stuff I'd suggest before lunch is a good time - anchored to another interruption that would happen anyway, and provides an incentive to finish quickly without making it a hard stop.

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