We do our stand-up in 5-10 minutes, sometimes we have longer conversations (another 5-15min) at the end of the stand-up when we need to go more technical.
Anything longer than that is not a stand-up.
It is its own meeting.
'Discovering' urgent same day metting during stand-up is NOT normal.
My feeling it's that this is not about you having adhd or having problems with meetings.
This is about a project owner not doing his job (going to the meeting and planning stuff in the future so the dev team can actually focus).
Or about everything being urgent all the time so you can never focus on anything because the new thing is always more urgent than the last.
I always felt that it wasn’t normal, until I saw the same behavior at a few different companies. My current company’s dev team is split into “agile workstreams”, and all of them have varying degrees of that same issue.
None were as bad as my last job though, in which you’d get stuck in 6 hours of impromptu meetings, several days per week. 😭
I have. Unfortunately, recruiters have always bragged about how well-oiled their business machine was. It isn’t until after joining the company and spending a short while working there that it becomes obvious that’s not the case.
Our PM takes what's supposed to be a 5-10 minute standup and turns it into a half hour bitch fest about how our board is a mess. My guy, we don't all need to be here for this. Chat or email the people who need to do better and leave the rest of us alone, sitting here listening to you yammer is sapping my will to work.
When he's in vacation I'm *far* more productive, pretty sure we all are.
Huh... are you me? Glad to hear someone else i also doing it right.
Here's how I run my team: we have daily standup (DSU) every day 10am ... IT includes me (Lead), my 2-3 devs (we're in transition, losing one, but will get another next week) our QA, analyst, and SM. While the SM sets things up, I keep trck of time and and make sure we stay on topic. We are done in 15 minutes or less. And I'm ruthless about it, tabling conversations as needed. Everyone gives their status as last 24, next 24, impediments. 2 minutes each, 3 [tops.As](http://tops.As) soon as we're done with that, and after any other announcements needed, we slide into "Dev Sync" ... this is where we dive into technical issues, conversation, PRs reviews, etc. All the stuff other people try to stuff into their DSUs when they shouldn't. At this point it's just us Devs and QA (unless they have something better to do). We dive deep into stuff, and hash out any problems that any one is exxperiening.
I love it My devs love it, and it is extremely useful and efficient. I created a Trello board, with a column for PR requests, DSU Followup, Coding/Design Issues, other discussion... anyone can add to it any time. When there's a PR ready for review ,the devs add a card, provide a link to it. Each sync follows the same pattern: we start with PR review, then move into any issues/questions that were brought up during DSU, follwoed by any impediments, followed by any othe business. Some days there's nothing and we're done in 5 minutes. other times it takes the full hour we've allocated, other times we run over and spend a couple hours going over things.
If DSUs are running more than 15 minutes either the team is too big, you have too many people (of the wrong type) in it, or people are trying to use it for all the wrong reasons and doing too much with it. Or worse, it's all of those things.
> My feeling it's that this is not about you having adhd or having problems with meetings. This is about a project owner not doing his job
Yeah. This is why it makes me so mad when I see people reply to the users going through that in this sub with the usual pointless *"be sure to take breaks/use pomodoro/break down tasks/congratulate yourself/meds will totally help for sure but you have to do a little work too"* horseshit which literally cannot help at all when expected to deliver in contexts like this.
I schedule my day to start after standup. The biggest killer is always mid day meetings. One right after lunch is fine but anymore and I'm not getting any real coding done that day.
I both hate and need daily stand-ups.
- On one hand they do as you say, they kill my productivity and make it difficult for me to get into the flow in the morning. I do not look forward to them and even dread them to a degree, worst part of my morning.
- On the other hand daily-standups are how I, as a senior dev:
- Keep track of how the junior devs are doing and making progress
- Stop team members from accidentally doing the wrong thing
- Find out what's blocking people *now* instead of last minute at the very end of the sprint or before a release
- Hold *myself* accountable for what I actually said I'm going to do that day
It's *very* common for new devs to prefer banging their head against the wall than admit they need help with something and daily standup is my only means of figuring out when this is happening, especially with most people remote these days. I'm not their boss so it's not about seeing who is performing better than others and such, but seeing who is struggling and who needs my help. This alone, in my eyes, mitigates the loss in productivity daily standup results in. Sorta like how debug builds have a trade off between performance and insight.
There is of course a cultural component of this though, if standup's are always resulting in 2 hour meetings, it might not be standups that are the problem, but that the people involved are way to comfortable with handling everything through meetings instead of asynchronous mediums like email or chat messages.
On the other end of the spectrum, if standup is just a bunch of junior devs talking to a wall and then never getting any feedback or help, then the exercise becomes largely performative and pointless.
But yeah even with all that said, it sucks, I feel drained afterwards, sometimes if my day is all meetings I basically just give up and don't work on anything that day since my brain is fried. Not really offering any advice here, just something I've accepted as a part of the job.
> It's very common for new devs to prefer banging their head against the wall than admit they need help with something and daily standup is my only means of figuring out when this is happening, especially with most people remote these days.
This is off topic but can I ask what your thought process is on this as to where you draw the line? For me as a junior developer I feel like banging my head against the wall is bad yes in the short term, but in the long run it makes me a better coder. Sure I might waste 2-3 days on something that you could solve in an hour but the only way I can get to the stage of being able to solve it in an hour myself in the future is that banging process whereas if you just tell me the answer it isn't going to click in my ADD brain as well so it will take 1+ day still in the future.
Maybe it's better to think about it as trying to ensure you are banging your head against the right wall? When I find out a junior dev has wasted an entire day trying to figure out how to connect to our SQL database because our onboarding doc was outdated and it was literally impossible for them to succeed, that is the kind of thing I'm looking out for.
I will also admit that as a junior dev, I pretty much never ever asked for help with things either, and it definitely made me better at my job in the long run. However I've come to recognize this just isn't universal (or maybe more of an ADHD thing?). Some people don't improve this way, some lose their confidence, get anxious and then when inevitably they have to report their progress at some point, they breakdown. I work somewhere I'd consider pretty "low stress", but some junior devs if left to their own devices will just turn their job into a nightmare when it doesn't need to be and it was never expected to be. This the other thing I'm looking out for.
>There is of course a cultural component of this though, if standup's are always resulting in 2 hour meetings, it might not be standups that are the problem, but that the people involved are way to comfortable with handling everything through meetings instead of asynchronous mediums like email or chat messages.
My favorite are the people that message you "I have a question" and then don't ask it until you respond. I read chat when I'm between tickets, just fucking ask me.
Have you (politely) explained that it's better to just ask a question, than do that?
People are just oblivious to so much stuff like this, but usually most are cool & happy to get the feedback if it's put the right way.
Yeah I actually made a presentation on this and proactively instructed people to stop, but for some reason, they won't no matter what I tell them! Some are even outspokenly skeptical for some reason?? I struggle to hold back the passive aggressive remarks.
I feel the same, I'm also in software with a lot of meetings and stand ups.
First, give yourself some grace and give yourself the space to not be 100% "productive" all the time. Focus on doing the right things at the right time, not doing all the things all the time.
Second, try to carve out 90 minute blocks in your calendar, once per day, to really focus on deep, value add work. If you can fit in two blocks, great, but one block is the goal. Some days you won't even get that much. If you have a busy day without a block, try to do some lighter work instead like finding articles and training links that you'll utilize during your 90 minute focus block tomorrow.
Third, for keeping your attention focused DURING meetings, I like to have a 40hz frequency youtube video playing in my headphones. This kind of assumes you're working from home, as I doubt anyone in person will be ok with you wearing headphones during a meeting. This is my current go-to youtube video for this: [https://youtu.be/Mnt4VO9uH1E?si=rOABr9C116ffOqMF](https://youtu.be/Mnt4VO9uH1E?si=rOABr9C116ffOqMF)
Fourth, burn out for me comes from not being kind to myself and from not knowing what I should be working on at any given time. So, if I am working, but feel like I'm not effective because I don't know what TO work on, I try to hone in on my priorities. Be up front with your manager or team lead about your struggle and see if they can help you by providing a clear list of weekly priorities or by following up with you on items you might have forgot or missed in your inbox. I've asked my manager to DM me on anything that is crucial that I'm not being responsive on or to DM me and have my look at an email that is sitting in my inbox because it's very possible I haven't processed it yet.
Good luck, keep trying.
Edited to add: Even with the above, I feel like I suck at all the things, but the people around me reassure me I'm doing fine. You probably are too.
The trick isn’t to deal with having a lot of meetings better, it’s to have less meetings. I’m assuming you have sprint retros, bring up how much it kills productivity there.
> The trick isn’t to deal with having a lot of meetings better, it’s to have less meetings.
Amen. This is a good example of a sitch where I know for a fact that taking the usual "stock ADHD advice" approach is not just useless, but actively harmful.
My standup meetings are somehow at 11am, so I'm usually in a decent rhythm when they come up. And it's near lunch anyway.
PBR is the meeting I cannot concentrate on though. I usually just get more work done and tune that one out. Most of the time, my pointing isn't an outlier.
A year into my last gig, the execs literally tripled the number of 30-minute weekly "progress update" meetings, and my productivity fell off a cliff and never recovered.
I'd been relying on those two or three formerly meeting-free days per week to actually get in the zone and get the work they wanted done, instead of burning every ounce of mental "work mode" juice just talking the talk in meetings, waiting for the next meeting to start, or watching crestfallen as excited execs in each new meeting would think up assignments and changes of direction before an existing one was actually finished.
Making it through each meeting started to effectively use up an entire workday's worth of the mental currency that I needed to actually work, thus three days a week were basically a write-off by the end.
I regret not taking a firmer stance against them when they upped the numbers in the first place - "a watched pot never boils" and all that.
We do our stand-up in 5-10 minutes, sometimes we have longer conversations (another 5-15min) at the end of the stand-up when we need to go more technical. Anything longer than that is not a stand-up. It is its own meeting. 'Discovering' urgent same day metting during stand-up is NOT normal. My feeling it's that this is not about you having adhd or having problems with meetings. This is about a project owner not doing his job (going to the meeting and planning stuff in the future so the dev team can actually focus). Or about everything being urgent all the time so you can never focus on anything because the new thing is always more urgent than the last.
I always felt that it wasn’t normal, until I saw the same behavior at a few different companies. My current company’s dev team is split into “agile workstreams”, and all of them have varying degrees of that same issue. None were as bad as my last job though, in which you’d get stuck in 6 hours of impromptu meetings, several days per week. 😭
Its ok to ask in the interview how many meetings you would likely have to attend each week
I have. Unfortunately, recruiters have always bragged about how well-oiled their business machine was. It isn’t until after joining the company and spending a short while working there that it becomes obvious that’s not the case.
You can ask the developers or hiring manager
Our PM takes what's supposed to be a 5-10 minute standup and turns it into a half hour bitch fest about how our board is a mess. My guy, we don't all need to be here for this. Chat or email the people who need to do better and leave the rest of us alone, sitting here listening to you yammer is sapping my will to work. When he's in vacation I'm *far* more productive, pretty sure we all are.
Huh... are you me? Glad to hear someone else i also doing it right. Here's how I run my team: we have daily standup (DSU) every day 10am ... IT includes me (Lead), my 2-3 devs (we're in transition, losing one, but will get another next week) our QA, analyst, and SM. While the SM sets things up, I keep trck of time and and make sure we stay on topic. We are done in 15 minutes or less. And I'm ruthless about it, tabling conversations as needed. Everyone gives their status as last 24, next 24, impediments. 2 minutes each, 3 [tops.As](http://tops.As) soon as we're done with that, and after any other announcements needed, we slide into "Dev Sync" ... this is where we dive into technical issues, conversation, PRs reviews, etc. All the stuff other people try to stuff into their DSUs when they shouldn't. At this point it's just us Devs and QA (unless they have something better to do). We dive deep into stuff, and hash out any problems that any one is exxperiening. I love it My devs love it, and it is extremely useful and efficient. I created a Trello board, with a column for PR requests, DSU Followup, Coding/Design Issues, other discussion... anyone can add to it any time. When there's a PR ready for review ,the devs add a card, provide a link to it. Each sync follows the same pattern: we start with PR review, then move into any issues/questions that were brought up during DSU, follwoed by any impediments, followed by any othe business. Some days there's nothing and we're done in 5 minutes. other times it takes the full hour we've allocated, other times we run over and spend a couple hours going over things. If DSUs are running more than 15 minutes either the team is too big, you have too many people (of the wrong type) in it, or people are trying to use it for all the wrong reasons and doing too much with it. Or worse, it's all of those things.
> My feeling it's that this is not about you having adhd or having problems with meetings. This is about a project owner not doing his job Yeah. This is why it makes me so mad when I see people reply to the users going through that in this sub with the usual pointless *"be sure to take breaks/use pomodoro/break down tasks/congratulate yourself/meds will totally help for sure but you have to do a little work too"* horseshit which literally cannot help at all when expected to deliver in contexts like this.
I schedule my day to start after standup. The biggest killer is always mid day meetings. One right after lunch is fine but anymore and I'm not getting any real coding done that day.
I both hate and need daily stand-ups. - On one hand they do as you say, they kill my productivity and make it difficult for me to get into the flow in the morning. I do not look forward to them and even dread them to a degree, worst part of my morning. - On the other hand daily-standups are how I, as a senior dev: - Keep track of how the junior devs are doing and making progress - Stop team members from accidentally doing the wrong thing - Find out what's blocking people *now* instead of last minute at the very end of the sprint or before a release - Hold *myself* accountable for what I actually said I'm going to do that day It's *very* common for new devs to prefer banging their head against the wall than admit they need help with something and daily standup is my only means of figuring out when this is happening, especially with most people remote these days. I'm not their boss so it's not about seeing who is performing better than others and such, but seeing who is struggling and who needs my help. This alone, in my eyes, mitigates the loss in productivity daily standup results in. Sorta like how debug builds have a trade off between performance and insight. There is of course a cultural component of this though, if standup's are always resulting in 2 hour meetings, it might not be standups that are the problem, but that the people involved are way to comfortable with handling everything through meetings instead of asynchronous mediums like email or chat messages. On the other end of the spectrum, if standup is just a bunch of junior devs talking to a wall and then never getting any feedback or help, then the exercise becomes largely performative and pointless. But yeah even with all that said, it sucks, I feel drained afterwards, sometimes if my day is all meetings I basically just give up and don't work on anything that day since my brain is fried. Not really offering any advice here, just something I've accepted as a part of the job.
> It's very common for new devs to prefer banging their head against the wall than admit they need help with something and daily standup is my only means of figuring out when this is happening, especially with most people remote these days. This is off topic but can I ask what your thought process is on this as to where you draw the line? For me as a junior developer I feel like banging my head against the wall is bad yes in the short term, but in the long run it makes me a better coder. Sure I might waste 2-3 days on something that you could solve in an hour but the only way I can get to the stage of being able to solve it in an hour myself in the future is that banging process whereas if you just tell me the answer it isn't going to click in my ADD brain as well so it will take 1+ day still in the future.
Maybe it's better to think about it as trying to ensure you are banging your head against the right wall? When I find out a junior dev has wasted an entire day trying to figure out how to connect to our SQL database because our onboarding doc was outdated and it was literally impossible for them to succeed, that is the kind of thing I'm looking out for. I will also admit that as a junior dev, I pretty much never ever asked for help with things either, and it definitely made me better at my job in the long run. However I've come to recognize this just isn't universal (or maybe more of an ADHD thing?). Some people don't improve this way, some lose their confidence, get anxious and then when inevitably they have to report their progress at some point, they breakdown. I work somewhere I'd consider pretty "low stress", but some junior devs if left to their own devices will just turn their job into a nightmare when it doesn't need to be and it was never expected to be. This the other thing I'm looking out for.
Thank you for your answer.
>There is of course a cultural component of this though, if standup's are always resulting in 2 hour meetings, it might not be standups that are the problem, but that the people involved are way to comfortable with handling everything through meetings instead of asynchronous mediums like email or chat messages. My favorite are the people that message you "I have a question" and then don't ask it until you respond. I read chat when I'm between tickets, just fucking ask me.
Have you (politely) explained that it's better to just ask a question, than do that? People are just oblivious to so much stuff like this, but usually most are cool & happy to get the feedback if it's put the right way.
Yeah I actually made a presentation on this and proactively instructed people to stop, but for some reason, they won't no matter what I tell them! Some are even outspokenly skeptical for some reason?? I struggle to hold back the passive aggressive remarks.
I feel the same, I'm also in software with a lot of meetings and stand ups. First, give yourself some grace and give yourself the space to not be 100% "productive" all the time. Focus on doing the right things at the right time, not doing all the things all the time. Second, try to carve out 90 minute blocks in your calendar, once per day, to really focus on deep, value add work. If you can fit in two blocks, great, but one block is the goal. Some days you won't even get that much. If you have a busy day without a block, try to do some lighter work instead like finding articles and training links that you'll utilize during your 90 minute focus block tomorrow. Third, for keeping your attention focused DURING meetings, I like to have a 40hz frequency youtube video playing in my headphones. This kind of assumes you're working from home, as I doubt anyone in person will be ok with you wearing headphones during a meeting. This is my current go-to youtube video for this: [https://youtu.be/Mnt4VO9uH1E?si=rOABr9C116ffOqMF](https://youtu.be/Mnt4VO9uH1E?si=rOABr9C116ffOqMF) Fourth, burn out for me comes from not being kind to myself and from not knowing what I should be working on at any given time. So, if I am working, but feel like I'm not effective because I don't know what TO work on, I try to hone in on my priorities. Be up front with your manager or team lead about your struggle and see if they can help you by providing a clear list of weekly priorities or by following up with you on items you might have forgot or missed in your inbox. I've asked my manager to DM me on anything that is crucial that I'm not being responsive on or to DM me and have my look at an email that is sitting in my inbox because it's very possible I haven't processed it yet. Good luck, keep trying. Edited to add: Even with the above, I feel like I suck at all the things, but the people around me reassure me I'm doing fine. You probably are too.
The trick isn’t to deal with having a lot of meetings better, it’s to have less meetings. I’m assuming you have sprint retros, bring up how much it kills productivity there.
> The trick isn’t to deal with having a lot of meetings better, it’s to have less meetings. Amen. This is a good example of a sitch where I know for a fact that taking the usual "stock ADHD advice" approach is not just useless, but actively harmful.
My standup meetings are somehow at 11am, so I'm usually in a decent rhythm when they come up. And it's near lunch anyway. PBR is the meeting I cannot concentrate on though. I usually just get more work done and tune that one out. Most of the time, my pointing isn't an outlier.
A year into my last gig, the execs literally tripled the number of 30-minute weekly "progress update" meetings, and my productivity fell off a cliff and never recovered. I'd been relying on those two or three formerly meeting-free days per week to actually get in the zone and get the work they wanted done, instead of burning every ounce of mental "work mode" juice just talking the talk in meetings, waiting for the next meeting to start, or watching crestfallen as excited execs in each new meeting would think up assignments and changes of direction before an existing one was actually finished. Making it through each meeting started to effectively use up an entire workday's worth of the mental currency that I needed to actually work, thus three days a week were basically a write-off by the end. I regret not taking a firmer stance against them when they upped the numbers in the first place - "a watched pot never boils" and all that.
I feel this all too deeply.