It can happened with a small team spread across a number of projects too.

Or sometimes you just really don't care.

> Or sometimes you just really don't care.

Agreed. Hearing about the minutiae about someone's task is tedious. To me the daily scrum is like getting home and asking your significant other "how was work today?". Boring question, boring answer.

I definitely prefer the asynchronous approach. That way if I don't care about what you're working on (or vice versa), we don't need to waste time standing in a room together.

My take is that if the work other people are doing isn't interesting, you shouldn't be at the same meeting.

If you can't learn from what they're saying, don't need to know it, and can't contribute, then you shouldn't be there. This is why we use feature crews as a subset of the team.

It's not that I'm not interested. It's just that I respect their time too much to interrupt their important work for the selfish purpose of satisfying my curiosity. I'll have a chance to ask them casually when the time is right, or if I am dying to know, I'll take a look at their check-in messages.

If part of my work depends on theirs, or requires specific coordination, I'll use whatever mutually agreeable medium to exchange the information that is needed.

I've never really felt like I didn't know what people on the team were working on, despite not having a daily meeting or weekly status.

I don't get the blockers thing either. If I'm blocked, you're getting an email or IM immediately. I'm not going to wait until the weekly status email, or even the next day, to tell you. And I'm not going to bother the people who can't do anything about it.

If you spoke more openly about what you did, maybe briefly about any challenges you faced, someone may ask you about that. They may realize you solved a problem they were having. Maybe your team lead would be able to notice, "oh, you were struggling with that? So was your other teammate, you two should talk!"

But understand the hesitation. And if someone is blocked, agreed, it should result in a quick email or IM. Of course, if you spent all day yesterday trying to figure something out but are just feeling kind of stuck, standup call is a great place to say, "hmmm, I can keep working on this, but if someone has some time, I could sure use a second brain to help."