Daily Scrums are one of the Scrum ceremonies. In a Daily Scrum, the Development Team comes together to discuss and plan how they are going to proceed towards the Sprint Goal and if there are anything that's stopping them from doing it. Daily Scrums should be held daily and they should last a maximum of 15 minutes.

Daily Scrums (dailies for short) work pretty much exactly the same way for living a Scrumlife. Every morning I write a plan for the day, pick some items from the Backlog to handle and note if there are some issues or situations that I need to take into account today.

In this case the dailies are spaceboxed. I have a very simple default weekly planner template that I write into and there's a box for each day that can only have as much text in it as it can. I should be singletasking the daily and filling the box doesn't take that long, so I haven't bothered setting a separate timebox for the daily.

I have very firm belief that writing by hand is important. It just feels much more like thinking than writing on a keyboard. You get to do something with your hands in a different way. Many agree (see for example Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones for a very inspiring example). I have done morning pages earlier and found them very enjoyable and useful, but let's face it, no-one has time to write three whole pages every morning. The small box I have for a daily is completely doable though. I've managed to have dailies this way while waiting for my younger kid to finish breakfast before we leave for the daycare.

While writing the daily I try to think what I could do to progress towards my Sprint Goal and check out my Sprint Backlog for items I could handle today. Only things related to confusing and complex project stuff lives on the Sprint Backlog. If I know I have a busy day today already, I don't pick that many backlog items to try to work on. Food needs to be cooked and emails need to get responded every day and I don't need to use Scrum to handle that kind of simple things. In the daily I estimate how much bandwidth I have for exploratory "scrum stuff" in addition of all the routines, meetings, etc. and try to pick the highest priority thing to tackle in addition of those.

(I run a separate GTD system which contains all the simple stuff like things I've promised to handle for existing customers, that I should water the plants every two days or that I need to take my vitamins in the morning. I use OmniFocus for this personally. I actually do keep my backlog there also but backlogs are a whole separate post.)

The daily has to end when the box has been written full. Nothing complicated about that.

The Daily Scrum helps me focus the day while giving me a reason to write by hand. Very many life management systems have some process like this, so there are maybe no new revelations to be had here. The difference is that all the other Scrum structures work together to focus the daily planning nicely. You have your Sprint Goals, foreseeable impediments and your backlogs, so every day you have a pretty clear idea on how the daily should go.

Super simple stuff this time. I just have dailies and focus flows out.