The only piece that I would add to this article is the concept of a daily morning scrum. For virtual teams this can be accomplished via Campfire. For those who don't know about a daily scrum, the idea is that you take 5-15 minutes (the shorter the time the better) first thing in the morning and everybody goes through briefly 1) What they did yesterday 2) What they're working on today 3) Anyone they need to sit down with to help them become unblocked / discuss a feature with. Doing so every morning is a great way to keep everyone on the same page and provides a good balance between autonomous time and keeping everyone on the same page.
Doing this meeting while standing helps to keep the meeting short and to the point, and if you find yourself engaging in discussion about a particular feature / item / issue..."take it offline". Don't use everyone's time to discuss something that should be discussed at a later time when everyone else could be in flow.
I find the daily morning scrum meeting a major "zone killer". It's completely orthogonal to how I function that I often spend a major part of the day just recovering from it.
I arrive in the office ready to roll, motivated, head full of ideas that have matured during the night, breakfast and commute. I can litterally arrive, sit down and crank out code (or whatever task is on). And then it's daily morning scrum meeting, and even that 5 or 10 minutes (when done right, a thing I've never seen with my own eyes) totally kills this mental state. 99% of the time my task is self-sufficient enough that what other team members do is completely irrelevant to me and I rarely have any insight to give them either. And I don't remember nor even care what I did yesterday, it's done, forgotten, check the SVN commit logs if you want to know about it. So I zone out, then the meeting is over and I've half-forgotten what I was doing so it's time to look at the latest meme on reddit.
I'd gladly settle for a daily _evening_ scrum meeting:
- What did you do today?
- What bothered you?
- What will you do tomorrow?
put that in the back of my mind and go home, I'm sure I'll have sorted things during the night to be useful tomorrow.
Doing this meeting while standing helps to keep the meeting short and to the point, and if you find yourself engaging in discussion about a particular feature / item / issue..."take it offline". Don't use everyone's time to discuss something that should be discussed at a later time when everyone else could be in flow.