Weekly Work Journaling

A Good Habit with Many Benefits

I don’t remember where I first heard about this practice, but it was probably a little over a year ago. The basic idea is that at the end of each week, you write down at a fairly high level what you accomplished that week with just enough detail so that when it comes time for your quarterly or semi-annual or yearly review, you can easily look back and remember what you did and how things from earlier in the year affected what you did later on. I also find it useful to add a couple notes regarding who you interacted with and how they may have helped you (or hindered you) so that when it comes time for peer reviews, you’ve got those notes to look back on as well.

Some examples of what you might write down as an engineering manager:

• “Met with the team to discuss the upcoming quarter’s OKRs and how we’re going to achieve them.”
• “In our weekly 1:1, Steve mentioned a concern about the brittleness of our end-to-end tests. I will ensure he has time next sprint to work on improving them.”
• “Met with the manager for the team that owns the API we depend on to discuss the upcoming changes to the API and how we can prepare for them.”
• “Found that the documentation for one of our features has multiple errors. I created a Jira ticket to address the errors and then I met with the team to discuss ways we can ensure these errors get caught before getting published.”
• “At the request of Stacy, I met with the lead developer for X platform to act as the Subject Matter Expert for our framework and steered them in the right direction for a few of the issues they were having.”
• “Participated in an interview for our new UX Lead. I was able to provide some insight into the team’s needs and how the candidate might fit in.”
• “Janet assisted me in preparing for a meeting with the CEO. She helped me to understand the context of the meeting and what the CEO was hoping to get out of it.”

The level of detail and the number of items each week is totally up to you. I’d suggest writing enough so that when you look back six months from now you have enough context to remind you of what you did, but not so much that it is full of unimportant details you won’t need when it comes time for your review. You’ll find that as you proceed, you’ll get better at determining how much detail you need to capture.

Another benefit to this practice is that when it comes time for your 1:1s with your own manager, or even your skip-level manager, you’ll have a list of topics to choose from. If you want to take the concept even further, you could distill your journal entries each month or each quarter into a higher-level view of what you did and how it relates to the goals you set for yourself. This can be a great way to ensure you’re on track to meet your goals and to identify any areas where you may need to adjust your goals or your approach.