It’s been a bit over two months since I’ve started writing weeknotes at work, and I’m sure you’re all on the edge of your seat dying to know how it’s going. Well, I’m please to say that, on net, it’s been quite helpful.

Now, I’ve gotta be honest here: doing weeknotes is not quite a decision that’s completely my own. We’re technically required to write these notes and submit them to our managers1. But I was so bad at doing this. Most weeks I submitted nothing at all, and when I did write something, it was little more than three or four dot points with a Jira ticket number and a summary.

So I guess you could say the decision I made here was writing “good” weeknotes. And I think putting some effort in the notes I wrote was the right decision to make. I managed to clear the first hurdle, which was developing a routine. First thing Monday morning, after booting my laptop and before I grab my (second) coffee, I sit down for 15-30 minutes and write out what I achieved last week and what I plan to focus on for the week ahead. I switched away from dot points to writing prose. It’s not very interesting prose — it’s little more than “last week I did this, this week I’ll do that” — but I think it makes for a better record of what I was working on. I hear that others keep their weeknotes open during the week so they can add to them as things crop up, sort of like a live journal. I tried this for a little bit, but the day-to-day tasks I work on are not particularly interesting. I think the weekly summary works.

I think there’s still areas for fine tuning this, particularly around the content itself. As useful as the weekly record of work could be, I think including some thoughts of designing a task or opinions on how we do things could also be beneficial, or at least interesting. I do know that my manages read these notes, as I’ve received questions from them about them. And although I’ve yet to actually need to reference previous notes I’ve written (it’s only been two months after all) I’m guessing that’ll just come with time as well.

So this is definitely something I will continue (again, partly because I have to).

Oh, and I did end up using the blogging feature in Confuence for this. First time I used it for anything, actually.

  1. I do know the reason why we do this. I’m not entirely sure I can say, but I can tell you that it’s not (entirely?) for monitoring performance. ↩︎