I love daily standups, but what happens when you're standing (working) alone? Or it's not in the organizational culture? Even if you're lucky enough to have a standup meeting at work, you still have to find the thread of continuity from your work yesterday to your plans today and be able to communicate it in just a minute or so.

Personally, I find it hard to get a focused start on a workday if I don't know where I am on my road map of things to do and have a list of tangible discrete tasks. It's easier to feel overwhelmed or just kind of vague about what needs to be done. Also, when diversions occur, as they always do -- an unexpected bug or meeting -- it's easy to lose track of where the time went. People can get overwhelmed, let things pile up, veer down a different path without fully acknowledging the trade offs, or buy Getting Things Done and leave it unread on the shelf for a year. :) Enter the quickie, low-tech, solo-standup worksheet. This is a bastardization of various techniques I've observed in others, and I've found it to be simple, repeatable, and helpful enough to actually stick. I've used it for standup prep, centering myself when working freelance from home, and when working as the sole developer in an organization that doesn't have a standup culture. Instructions: take a sheet of paper and divide it into 4 sections: the first three roughly even, the last being the smallest. Xerox it a bunch of times, punch holes in them, and put them in a binder. Then each day, take 5-10 minutes at the beginning of each day to fill it out. These are the categories:

1. Yesterday -- quick bullets of what you actually did yesterday
2. Today Planned -- quick bullets of what you plan to do today. Filling this in helps you plan the whole day, and quickly structure the big items. It also encourages you to write down things you need to do, even if you may not want to do them. Once they're written down, they become much harder to ignore.
3. Today Happened -- a place to jot down things that may have come up unexpectedly -- e.g., "impromptu UI meeting to discuss new sale". So when tomorrow comes and you didn't finish everything from yesterday, you can see what took its place.
4. Floating -- This is for things that come up during the day that you'd like to get done, but don't quite fit in the plan. They're ideas you don't want to lose, things you might want to integrate into a later "Today Planned" category; or things that after a week or so you realize aren't that important anyway. Scratch them at the bottom of the page as the day goes, and keep a visual inventory over the weeks.

Here's an example of mine from July 2nd. Nothing fancy, but that's the point. Each day, you do a sheet like this -- and, over time, you have a binder of documentation you can flip back through.

I still use digital tools -- Basecamp and Pivotal Tracker come to mind, but this serves a slightly different purpose -- it's an act of personal attention / intention. Reading my sheet from yesterday and then putting pen to paper as the first act in the day is a simple habit that has a mind-calming effect. It's a way of acknowledging the process and keeping accountable to the steps along the way.