🧠 Are daily standups really useful, or do we just do them out of inertia?

After years working in agile environments, I’d like to open this debate: does it really make sense to have a daily every single day? Because often it feels more like a ritual obligation than a tool that brings real value.

👉 Broken flexibility

One of the biggest advantages of working in tech is flexible hours. But if there’s a daily at 9:00:

• Those who start at 8:00 have to interrupt their flow.
• Those who prefer starting at 10:00 lose their flexibility.

👉 It doesn’t unblock issues

A daily is supposed to help unblock things… but in 5–10 minutes? And if I get blocked at 11:00, do I have to wait until the next day? Asynchronous communication or asking for help in the moment works better.

👉 It’s not for control, but…

“It’s not about tracking what everyone is doing”… but we already have Jira, time reports, assigned tasks. Do we really need to verbalize what’s already documented?

👉 Diverse personal contexts

Some people want dailies at 7:30 because they go to bed at 9:00, while others can’t sleep before 1:00 due to family responsibilities. Imposing a fixed time can become a silent burden for many.

👉 Dailies at the start of a project: unnecessary pressure

At the beginning of a project, we can spend days — sometimes weeks — designing architecture, defining processes, and setting up environments. There’s no “visible” progress.

I’ve seen teams where, during these early phases, daily standups created anxiety instead of clarity: stakeholders felt nothing was being delivered, pushed for faster results, and the team ended up rushing decisions—building things quickly and poorly, accumulating technical debt.

✅ A better way to run dailies

In some teams, we’ve managed to turn dailies into something genuinely useful and flexible:

• They focus only on value-adding topics.
• Communication and visibility are maintained.
• Flexibility is respected.
• No one is penalized for not attending—people might be working or simply unavailable. There’s continuous communication, and we still know what everyone is working on.
• And most importantly: no one feels like they’re “reporting in.”

💬 Final thought

In my opinion, many dailies happen just because “that’s what the tutorial says.” But if they don’t add real value, if they’re done out of routine or for micromanagement… shouldn’t we rethink them?

🔁 What do you think?

What are your dailies like? Do they actually add value, or could they be reduced or adapted?