superlifter Weeknotes debug

I love the idea of weeknotes (honestly, I do) but I have always struggled with actually doing them, even more so now than when I first tried doing them many years ago. I either need to debug and fix, or stop trying.

I think this is because my work life looks organised but is actually quite chaotic:

• The majority of my time is on manager’s schedule, rather than maker’s: reactive and almost entirely unplanned. This doesn’t leave a lot of headspace for deep work.
• We use a Kanban-influenced approach. This is amazingly efficient in the right circumstances, but by default lacks any planning steps or natural pauses. It can end up as a never-ending conveyor belt of random tasks. Side note: this is why I like Shape Up so much. To me it feels like all the good bits of Kanban wrapped up in long iterations, with pausing and planning. Much healthier, I think, but hard to do solo.

My week generally ends up as a smear of random admin tasks. This doesn’t make for particularly useful or interesting weeknotes and is quite demotivating.

Time for a different approach.

Every Monday, I’m going to note down three goals for the week. I would love it to be one goal, but I have too many spinning plates. Every Friday, I’m going to write something about each goal, even if I haven’t finished them.

This week:

• Finish and send a new business proposal I’ve spent a week blocked on
• Write up my part of a client report
• Finish reading No Bullshit Strategy, then finish a proper 1.0 version of our business strategy