Do you have trouble remembering your software engineering accomplishments and todos for your standup update? Perhaps you work hard. You juggle a lot of tasks. You help your coworkers. But when the daily standup meeting comes around, you can't seem to remember everything.
I'll review the advantages and disadvantages of some common standup preparation strategies so you'll never sell yourself short or forget a task again.
Option #1 Take notes
Many experienced engineers take notes whenever they switch to a different task or leave their desks. They write what they're currently working on, what they've done, and some thoughts on the current task they are working on. You can do the same.
I've encountered a lot of engineers who keep a journal and pen around, but you could also use a note-taking app like Notes, Obsidian, or Notion.
Reference these notes before or during standup.
Advantages
- Full creative control. You can have whatever you want in your notes. You are limited only by your imagination.
- The notes are wherever you want to keep them, whether that is in a physical journal or your favorite note-taking app.
- If you are very particular, extremely disciplined, and extremely organized this may be the path for you.
Disadvantages
- Every item needs to be manually entered or written down.
- The notes are only as good as your consistency and discipline. If you forget to write something down, that thing won't be in your notes.
- Your ability to quickly grok what's going on in your professional life for a standup update depends upon the quality of your note-taking organization.
Option #2 Use bookmarks
The second option involves setting up bookmarks in your web browser so you can quickly review what you've done 5-10 minutes before the standup meeting.
Take a look at our guide on how to track your GitHub todos and accomplishments and how to track your Jira todos and accomplishments. From there, you can set up some bookmarked pages to reference before the standup meeting.
Advantages
- Uses dashboards maintained by GitHub and Jira.
- Less reliant on self-discipline and superhuman organizational skills.
Disadvantages
- The dashboards are not comprehensive and do not include all your todos and accomplishments.
- The dashboards are platform-specific. You'll need at least two browser tabs to thoroughly review where you are at.
- You'll have to look at timestamps to determine what has happened since the last standup update.
Option #3 BeyondDone App
The final option is the BeyondDone app, which offers you the ability to see all your todos and accomplishments in one special automatically generated standup update page.
There's even a copy/paste button so you can quickly drop the update in Slack.
BeyondDone allows you to configure the cadence and times of your standups so that the standup page always shows the relevant todos and accomplishments since your last standup meeting.
I use BeyondDone every day and it has turbocharged my ability to stay on top of things and sell myself better in standup.
I encourage you all to take a look at BeyondDone's features and sign up today. There's a 30-day free trial and no payment information is required up-front.
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