Twitter is like stand-up all day long (this is good)

Stand-up may be the highlight of my workday. There’s something about it–quick status updates, celebrating achievements, sharing milestones, the rhythm of it, team bonding, flagging confusion or misunderstandings, in-jokes (ending of course with “let’s be careful out there”), the ritual…

We briefly tried chat standup, but it was annoying and boring, so we went back to verbal standup. We briefly considered using Campfire within Basecamp as a chat stand-up. It seemed like a good idea, there’d be a record associated with each project, but it seemed to be organized by project and therefore over compartmentalized. We didn’t try it and have stuck with verbal stand-up at 10:30AM.

Recently, I’ve been twittering status messages. Twitter is like standup all day long, in a good way. Earlier this week, I was invited to a 10AM client conference call in an email I read at 8AM. I twittered that I had a surprise client meeting. A remote team member saw my twitter, IM’d me and asked if he needed to chime in on it. I might not have thought to ask him given the turnaround time, but he contributed.

Yay standup, yay twitter, go team.