Daily standup template for Slack, with three formats to copy

A standup template is just the message your team answers every day. That sounds too small to matter, but it decides everything downstream: what people write, how long it takes, and whether anyone reads the result. This page has three templates you can paste into Slack today, the tradeoffs of each, and what running them looks like by hand versus automated.

The classic template

This is the format most teams start with, inherited from in-person scrum:

Copy

asyncmateAPP9:00 AM

Daily standup

Reply in this thread by 10:30.

1. What did you do yesterday?
2. What will you do today?
3. Anything blocking you?

It works because everyone already knows how to answer it. Past, future, risk, three lines each.

Its weakness shows up after a few weeks: answers drift into diary entries written for the boss. "Worked on the API" tells nobody anything, and the blocker question goes permanently empty because saying "no blockers" every day is the path of least resistance. If your standup already reads like that, change the questions before you change anything else. We wrote a separate guide on what makes a standup question good, with five full question sets to steal.

The async-first template

Written standups are not meetings typed out. Nobody is waiting for their turn, so answers can be sharper and safer to skip when empty:

Copy

asyncmateAPP9:00 AM

Daily check-in

Answer whenever suits you before 14:00. Skip any question that has nothing new.

1. What moved since your last update?
2. What is the one thing you want to finish today?
3. What is at risk of slipping, and why?

Three details do the work here. "Since your last update" instead of "yesterday" survives weekends, days off and different working days without rewording. "The one thing" forces a priority instead of a list. And "at risk of slipping" catches problems a day earlier than "blocked", because most delays are visible before they become hard blockers.

The explicit permission to skip matters more than it looks. If empty answers are allowed, the answers that do arrive mean something.

The blocker-forward template

For teams that ship daily and coordinate tightly, flip the order and put risk first:

Copy

asyncmateAPP9:00 AM

Daily sync

1. Is anything blocking you or about to block you?
2. Do you need anything from anyone in this channel?
3. One line: what are you on today?

This is the shortest format that still coordinates a team. It works best when the team is small, senior and already visible to each other through commits and tickets, so repeating "what I did" would duplicate what the tools already show. The second question is the valuable one: it turns the standup from reporting into routing, because every answer names a person who should act.

Running a template by hand

You do not need any tool to start. Slack can do this on its own:

1. Post the template as a scheduled message to your team channel each morning (or use a recurring /remind; our Slack timer guide covers what /remind can and cannot do).
2. Have everyone answer in the thread.
3. Someone skims the thread and chases the people who did not answer.

This is genuinely fine for a team of three or four. The costs appear as you grow: the thread has no structure, so reading ten answers means scrolling ten essays. Nobody chases the missing answers on the day the one person who does is busy. People in other time zones get the prompt at a wrong hour. And past answers are effectively gone after a week of scrollback.

Automating it

A standup bot takes over exactly the mechanical parts: it delivers the questions to each person at the right local time, collects answers privately, and posts one digest to the channel so the team reads a summary instead of a thread. The digest also names who has not answered, so nobody has to keep a mental attendance list. Our Slack standup bot does this with any of the templates above; the questions are fully editable and the classic set is just a preset.

If you want to try the automated version before deciding anything, asyncmate is free for up to 10 people who answer. Reminders are free for everyone, so even the manual workflow above gets cheaper to run.

Adapting the template to your team

Whichever format you pick, three settings shape how it feels in practice:

Cadence. Daily is the default, not the law. Feature teams often do better with Monday, Wednesday, Friday. The template stays the same; only the "since your last update" phrasing matters more, which is another reason to prefer it over "yesterday".

Response window. Give people a real window, not a deadline at standup o'clock. A prompt at 9:00 with answers due by 14:00 lets deep-work mornings survive. The digest then posts once, when the window closes.

Time zones. If the team spans time zones, "9:00" means nothing. Send the prompt at 9:00 in each person's own time zone and close the window late enough for the last zone to answer. We cover the full setup, including where to post the digest, in the guide on standups across time zones.

Start with the async-first template

If you are unsure which format to pick, take the async-first template. It degrades gracefully: worst case, people answer it like the classic three questions and you have lost nothing. Best case, the sharper phrasing buys you a priority per person per day and a day of warning on slips. Paste it into a scheduled Slack message tomorrow morning, or set it up in asyncmate in about ten minutes and let the bot do the delivering, collecting and summarizing.

FAQ

What are the three standup questions? The classic set: what did you do yesterday, what will you do today, and is anything blocking you. It is the format most teams inherit from scrum, and it works until answers drift into diary entries. Our guide to daily standup questions has five alternative sets for when that happens.

How do I run a daily standup in Slack without a bot? Post the template as a scheduled message each morning, have everyone answer in the thread, and have someone chase the people who did not. That is genuinely fine for three or four people; the costs of scale are unstructured threads, nobody chasing on busy days, and answers vanishing into scrollback.

What is a good async standup format? The async-first template above: what moved since your last update, the one thing you want to finish today, and what is at risk of slipping. "Since your last update" survives weekends and days off, "one thing" forces a priority, and "at risk" catches problems a day before they become blockers. Allowing empty answers is part of the format, not a weakness of it.

Does a standup have to be daily? No. Daily is the default, not the law: feature teams often do better on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. If you drop below daily, prefer "since your last update" phrasing over "yesterday", and keep the response window generous so time zones do not turn the cadence into a deadline.