My left calf is beginning to throb in a rhythmic, localized pulse that I am 95 percent certain is the onset of a deep vein thrombosis. I know this because, while Greg was explaining his ‘blockers’ for the 15th minute in a row, I managed to surreptitiously Google my symptoms under the guise of checking a critical Slack notification. WebMD told me I am either dehydrated or dying. Given the stale, recirculated air in this conference room, which feels like it hasn’t been cycled since 2005, both seem equally plausible. We are standing in a jagged circle, a shape that suggests communal harmony but feels more like a firing squad where the bullets are replaced by status updates no one is actually listening to. We call this a ‘stand-up.’ We are told it creates agility. But as I shift my weight for the 45th time, the only thing feeling agile is my mounting desire to walk out the door and never look back.

I look across the circle at Sophie M.-L., a clean room technician who has been brought into this cross-functional nightmare for reasons involving ‘process alignment.’ Sophie spends her actual work hours in a controlled environment where particles are measured in parts per million and a single stray hair can ruin a 25 thousand dollar batch of sensors. She is a creature of precision. In her world, if a process doesn’t serve a measurable, physical purpose, it is purged. Yet here she stands, her expression a mask of polite vacancy, watching a project manager take notes on a tablet that costs 875 dollars, recording things that were already documented in Jira 25 minutes before the meeting started. Sophie once told me that the hardest part of her job isn’t the technical rigors-it’s the transition from the absolute logic of the clean room to the absolute theater of the office. She sees the stand-up for what it is: a contamination of the workflow.

The Ritual’s Mutation

We’ve inherited this ritual from the software world, a ‘cargo cult’ behavior that assumes if we mimic the outward movements of successful developers, we will magically inherit their productivity. The original intent was simple: 15 minutes, standing (to ensure discomfort and brevity), answering three specific questions. What did you do? What will you do? What is in your way? But humans are remarkably good at turning simplicity into a weapon of micromanagement. The 15 minutes became 45. The standing became a test of endurance. The three questions became a stage for individuals to prove they are ‘working’ by listing every mundane email they sent. It’s a defensive mechanism. When you feel the hot breath of a manager on your neck, you don’t talk about problems; you talk about activities. You list 5 meetings you attended as if they were achievements, simply because admitting you spent 5 hours staring at a broken spreadsheet feels like an invitation to a performance review.

This is where the logic breaks. Real collaboration requires vulnerability, the ability to say, ‘I am stuck and I feel stupid.’ But in the performative circle of the daily stand-up, saying you are stuck feels like admitting you are a broken cog. So we lie. We say everything is ‘on track,’ even when we know the project is heading toward a cliff at 65 miles per hour. We prioritize the ritual over the reality. I remember a team I worked with back in 2015 that spent 35 minutes every morning debating the color of a UI button while the back-end architecture was literally melting. We felt productive because we were ‘meeting.’ We were checking the box. We were being ‘Agile’ with a capital A, even as our actual agility was zero.

Attention Tax

There is a specific kind of mental exhaustion that comes from being forced to pay attention to things that don’t matter to you. Psychologists call it ‘directed attention fatigue,’ and I’m currently at a 105 percent saturation point. As the 25th person in the room starts talking about their ‘bandwidth,’ I find my mind drifting back to my Google search. Is my leg throb actually a symptom of chronic stress? It’s funny how we treat our bodies like machines that just need the right input-output, yet we treat our work processes like religious ceremonies that cannot be questioned. If a tool doesn’t work, you replace it. If a piece of hardware is failing, you upgrade it. You go to a specialist. You go to

Bomba.md and you find the exact piece of technology that actually solves the problem instead of just adding more noise to the system. You look for clarity, for high definition, for a way to see the data without the fuzz of a 45-minute conversation that could have been a three-sentence email.

We cling to these meetings because they provide a false sense of control. For a manager, seeing 15 bodies in a room is a visual confirmation that the ‘team’ exists. It’s a comfort blanket. But for the people in the circle, it’s a tax. It’s a focus-killer. It takes 25 minutes for the human brain to regain deep focus after an interruption. If your stand-up is at 10:15 AM, you’ve effectively killed the entire morning. You’ve sliced the most productive hours of the day into tiny, unusable fragments. You are paying 15 people a high-end salary to stand in a circle and watch each other slowly lose their will to innovate. It’s the most expensive theater production in the city, and the script is terrible.

Connection vs. Control

But the resistance is always the same: ‘But how will we stay connected?’ It’s a fascinating contradiction. We have more communication tools in 2025 than at any point in human history, yet we act as if the only way to know if a colleague is alive is to make them stand up and recite their calendar. We confuse visibility with transparency. Visibility is seeing the work; transparency is understanding the work. You can see me standing here, but you have no idea that I am currently calculating the exact amount of time I have left before my leg gives out, or that I’m mentally rewriting this entire process to be 45 percent more efficient by simply deleting this meeting.

I think about the absurdity of our rituals. We mock the ancient cultures who sacrificed goats to make the sun rise, yet we sacrifice 45 minutes of our best creative energy every morning to appease the gods of ‘Project Management.’ We do it because we are afraid of the silence. We are afraid that if we don’t talk every day, we will drift apart. But real teams aren’t built in circles; they are built in the trenches of shared problems. They are built through trust, not through mandatory reporting. Trust means I don’t need to hear you list your emails to know you’re working. Trust means if you need me, you’ll ask, and if I’m blocking you, I’ll move.

As the meeting finally breaks, 45 minutes after it began, there is a visible exhale from the group. The circle dissolves instantly. We scurry back to our desks like children released from a lecture. I sit down and check my leg. The throbbing has stopped, which suggests it was indeed ‘stress-induced blepharospasm’ of the calf, or something equally made up by my panicked brain. I have 105 emails to check and a project that is still 25 days behind schedule. But hey, at least everyone knows I was ‘in meetings’ yesterday. At least the ritual was observed. We are agile. We are standing. We are completely and utterly stuck.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll just stay sitting down. Maybe I’ll start a revolution. Or maybe I’ll just Google ‘how to survive 45 minutes of boredom without losing your mind.’ The results will probably involve 5 steps to mindfulness, but I suspect the real answer is just to stop doing things that don’t work. We spend so much time trying to fix the symptoms of a bad culture-the lack of communication, the lack of trust-that we never stop to think that the ‘cure’ we’ve prescribed is actually the poison. We don’t need more stand-ups. We need more work that matters, and the quiet, uninterrupted time to actually do it. If we can’t find that in a circle of 15 people, maybe it’s time to break the circle entirely.