How we do weekly updates

• We send weekly updates first thing on Monday. We then discuss individual items in our weekly meeting as needed.
  
• We send weekly updates to each other via e-mail. Subject line is Weekly updates so that historical updates are easy to find.
  
• The updates list things that we’ve been working on since the last update. Keywords and/or short sentences in bullet-point style are enough. The report should be concise and yet specific. For instance, “worked on project XYZ” is too vague, instead say what exactly you were doing, e.g.: “Wrote and submitted preregistration report for XYZ project.”
  
• We optionally list ongoing tasks even if we didn’t make progress on them, e.g: “XYZ manuscript needs revision, waiting for data of replication.”
  
• We also list things that we are planning to work on in the next week, but only major items and in broad strokes.
  
• If you are stuck with something and need input, you can mention this as well, e.g: “LMMs for XYZ analysis don’t converge. Do I have to reimplement in Stan?”
  

In the weekly meeting, we will quickly go through these updates and discuss where necessary. The updates therefore also serve as a (partial) agenda for the meeting.

Writing the updates shouldn’t take more than 10 min and going through the updates in the weekly meeting can take as little as 1 min when there's nothing to discuss.

1. Everyone gets an idea of what the other lab members are working on. This creates cohesion and common ground and may inspire new ideas and collaborations.
   
2. It gives people an opportunity to get quick input on smaller issues from the whole lab without having to schedule a dedicated lab meeting and without going through the mailing list. Many things can be solved much faster with everyone in a room.
   
3. Weekly updates are easier than monthly or bi-monthly updates, because it’s easier to remember what you were doing in the last week. From the top of my head, I have no idea what I was doing one or two months ago. Effectively, the psychological barrier to writing weekly reports is much lower.
   
4. Writing weekly reports helps us track our progress and reflect on how we spend our time. Comparing what we wanted to accomplish in a week with what we actually accomplished can surprise us – positively or negatively – and reflecting on it will help us make more realistic plans in the future.
   

1. Start by going through your updates from the previous week to refresh your memory.
   
2. If you’re using a software for to-do management, writing the report basically comes down to copying the list of ticked-off tasks and editing it lightly.
   
3. Remembering everything that happened in a week can be difficult. The following strategies can help:
   
   • Check your calendar.
     
   • Quickly review your e-mails (sent and received) for the last week. In my e-mail client, I created a virtual folder for this.
     
   • Inspect the list of files that changed in your relevant folders over the last 8 days. On Linux (and OSX?), this command that shows all files in the Documents and Dropbox folders that have changed in the last 8 days: find ~/Documents ~/Dropbox/ -mtime -8.
     
4. Add tasks that are on hold and things you’d like to get done in the coming week. Done!
   

For those who are not yet using a to-do manager of some sort, it's highly recommended. Most people eventually develop their own approach to managing to-dos but an excellent starting point is the Getting Things Done method (GTD) by David Allen.