People are creatures of habit, and effective work is produced by grooming useful habits. Here’s a quick write up of a useful habit: the weekly status report.

I haven’t always written these, and I haven’t always worked for people who’ve wanted to receive them, but I’ve been at my most effective when I was writing and discussing them.

A weekly report of your status is a distillation of the most important things that have happened in the last few days. It’s also an agenda for the next week, and a chance to reflect. It can also help you actually have a weekend, because you’re closing the books on Friday.

How to work this magic? You’ll need a text editor. I’m also fond of a cloud service for syncing text documents. You’ll need a communication tool too: email, slack, or a wiki.

The document: a simple text document with no formatting.

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Hi,

Meta:

• 1 line about you. Happy? Sick? Overworked?

$project:

• 1-3 single line statements of status affecting events.
• Started X
• Y Ongoing
• Finished Z
• Last release, date, purpose
• Next release, ETA, purpose
• The goal after that

*Repeat as needed.*

Thanks,
$me

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Every Friday when I’m about ready to call the day done, I open this document and replace last week’s material with this week’s. I reflect on how I’m doing and how that presents. Same items not moving? Can’t stand looking at this any more? I need help and this is my chance to ask.

Sync: If it’s possible to put this text block in a cloud sync service, then it’s possible to do this on your phone while riding to the airport or standing in the boarding line. That’s remarkably useful. The big thing is to see what you wrote last week.

A push based communication is ideal, because the recipients aren’t going to look at a web page. They’re all too used to safe and boring status, so don’t be boring. Email or Slack work. Skip the formatting and pictures. Just the status.

I’ve been in teams that used wikis or Evernote for status updates, and it can work, but it’s notably worse; those are the teams where a lot more phone calls were needed. There’s a reason those tools all send email notifications.

Finally, who to send your status to? Your manager is supposed to be thrilled to get a concise, timely, and accurate ping of status. However, folks sometimes fall short of ideals, and that doesn’t have to stop you from doing this work for yourself.

Given sufficient tuning and need, the weekly status can go to your teammates, your direct reports, or a cross-functional group. I do think it’s important to send it to someone, otherwise it’s a diary. But as in any writing, think of the audience.