And therein lies the problem. I can barely remember what I had yesterday for lunch, much less the cool stuff I was doing in January of this year. For years and years, I would torture and stress my neurons to remember the major results throughout the year. After a few years of an annual ceremony of banging my head against the wall, I started keeping notebooks. I could then scan through the notebooks for the nuggets of note and incorporate them in a summary. The problem with notebooks is that I wrote everything in my notebook. Live meeting notes, notes from presentations, musings and drawings, and just all sorts of minor events and details, making it tedious to pull out the actions of import for the summary. Then I got a boss that mandated a short status summary every two weeks. This became my lifeboat. Because he wanted them short, I had to focus on important events and accomplishments in the reports, making it trivial to pull out the significant things for the annual summary. No meeting minutes, no patent notes, no musings, just hardcore events in summary.
My method was simple. Every week, I would copy the old status report to a new file and open it. I would purge most of the old contents from the prior two weeks and insert the new stuff. I kept the notes organized by projects and themes (e.g., patents are not projects but generating new IP was a constant theme). I used projects and themes as section headers and put succinct statements of progress and accomplishments in each section. As new projects started or completed, new sections were added and deleted. The themes tended to be constant throughout the year.
When I came time to do the annual summary, my annual self-assessment for rating purposes, I opened the directory and worked through the status reports. This was relatively quick because most weeks had preliminary or intermediary results and I only needed to copy over the final or significant results into the annual summary. I could accurately remember what had been done, so I left nothing out. I kept to the active voice, so the summary was punchy. Should my boss have questions about any assertions, I pulled the weekly reports as backup documentation, so the annual review was pretty smooth.
I had two special sections in my fortnightly status reports that I kept for myself. In one section, I kept notes about directives and objectives from my boss. This proved handy for discussions with my boss about priorities and focus - I could document his directions. In the other private section, I kept people notes about the people I managed. Outstanding things they had done or things they had missed. This helped in conversations with my direct reports. Keeping the private parts private was something that required extra effort because I did not want to accidentially send out information intended to be kept private. My main action here was to add the private stuff to the file after I had sent off my status report to my boss, and I was careful to cut-and-paste the intended content into the email rather than to simply attach the whole file.
I do not know why, but I have always hated writing weekly or fortnightly status reports. It was foolish to resist all those years and I should have started much sooner in my career.
