Crafting, Receiving, Reviewing, Reports
A once popular morning ritual looked like grabbing coffee and the physical newspaper, and letting the local news, comics, advertisements, and social columns gently percolate into your brain as you explore the headlines, flip through the pages, and discover what peaks your interest that day. It was calm, exploratory, a rhythmic delving in and pulling back out of stories at your own pace. Waking up the brain, transitioning from rest to alert, firing up those sleepy neurons. Good morning to this new day.
With a little structure and foresight, reviewing work reports could also be part of a lovely transition from non-work to work. The rest of this post details how I make my own reports without access to anything fancier than a notes tool, and offering a guide on how you might be able to do this as well.
The power of reporting. It gets a lot of shade these days, but there is something special here, just have to know where to look. A report can be:
- part of a slow transition into the day
- mental scaffold building
- grounds a to-do list
- re-enforces progress
- ensures I’m only a few clicks away from an impromptu status update
crafting reports for yourself
To share or not to share these reports with anyone else, let’s put that aside for now. My goal in this post is to help you explore something extremely valuable for you, the reader, so that you can pilot this for yourself and start seeing benefits right away. Eventually it could be shared of course, but even if this is just for you and you’re getting insight from it, its a worthy endeavor.
The process of even thinking about what ideal reports look like for you could be interesting. Ideally, what information would you like to have at the beginning of the day? To anchor it, think about a newspaper format.
Forget your current system of reports (if any) for just a moment, and think about:
- The types of decisions you need to make for deliverables
- The preparation that needs to happen for meetings
- What information dictates your priority list
- The definition of success in your role
- Aspirations for your position - what do your colleagues higher up in the reporting structure care about in their day-to-day?
- Your specific expertise, what are you supposed to be the expert in, formally or informally?
Good. Before I give you what my take on the above questions look like, use the momentum gathered from how they apply to you and start to doodle within the confines of one page pdf. Mine contained a lot of columns, go ahead and dream a little bit - we can always rearrange, just get the important information on there in terms of indicators, metrics, lists.
[Image 1 different page layouts with spaces, columns]
Let this ideal report resonate a little bit. Any engineers out there already know what to do, they could probably craft something very automated, very fancy, given the proper permissions, but I am not an engineer and I’m going to walk you through how to set something up without a code editor.
logistics for non-engineers
Let’s say your ideal report has 6 metrics on it. For fun lets say:
- one key result from one objective your team needs to hit this quarter
- one progress update from one project you are responsible for
- one counter that counts up by one for each deliverable that is delivered for the month
- one progress update for a training course you’re enrolled in
- one progress update for a collection of documentation (other deliverables)
Each metric or indicator on your report needs to come from somewhere, so where does that source data live. Those products are going to be your first step, it’s likely those products have some sort of scheduling or automation criteria to send emails. Try to send yourself an email from these products to help you collect information for your metrics. I’d recommend setting up a subfolder and accompanying rule in your inbox to collect these.
Secondly, we have to get the information out of those emails, and into a beautiful (yes, making it beautiful is necessary) template report so that you can use it for planning the week & store it in a folder for yourself. Did I mention these kinds of reports come in especially handy whenever annual reviews come up, or any other sort of strategy meeting where those reports can inspire nice statistics and talking points.
Ultimately, this report is more like a worksheet to be filled out before it becomes a static pdf report but at least it will be useful. And, beautiful. And it will give you a piece of yourself back in this crazy world because it exists to support, encourage, and inspire, you.
[image 2 beautiful example of a report, something actually nice and not just movable tiles]
an example
My specific role right now lends itself to cute scribbles that look like:
- the count of deliverables moved to done last week
- attributes of deliverables to date (count, type, contribution to OKRs, etc)
- list of and updates on projects currently in progress
- list of and updates on repositories I own/contribute to
- 1:1 agenda items for the week
- notes from the book I’m reading for work
- notes from the certification course im enrolled in
- something interesting that happened (ex. from a podcast, random meeting, unexpected feedback, quote) this is a memory anchor
expectations
While putting all of this together it is natural to flip through inboxes looking for information, updating deliverables based on a passing glance, and scheduling in work for the week to set myself up for a nice full report next week as well.
During the first two weeks of using this template for my new position, I needed to make some changes until it felt good, but now it is representative of what is important week after week. I look forward to filling it out on Monday, it’s both a reset and an anchor for the week to come.
inspiration
[reports Inspo]