Weeknotes

Tuesday, January 14, 2025

It is a truism that we tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in a week, and underestimate what we can account in a year.

I think we also discount what we have already done. I can, at any given time, feel like I have accomplished absolutely nothing over the last year, despite that obviously not being true.

So I have recently begun the practice of what are called in tech circles, weeknotes. They take various forms, depending on who is doing them, but at a minimum, they are notes about your week. (Duh, as we said when we were kids).

What it looks like for me is an Evernote window I keep open all week, where I jot things I want to remember that happened that week - business, personal - it all goes into the same document. All week it looks like a long list of bullets.

Then Saturday, I clean it up, maybe drag in some photos, and save it, and open another one for next week.

If i just did this, it would be valuable. Like a low-key, low commitment diary.

But because I believe in the value of working in public, I pull out the items fit for public consumption and that I think my readers would be interested in, and share them on my website. They go out every Sunday morning.

I find them to be a pretty useful record of changes I made (When did I change domain providers? Where is hughlh.com hosted?) or vacations I took (what hotel did we stay in when we went to DC?) or even as a way of learning how long it’s been since I went home and saw my mother (the answer is always, according to her, “too long”).

Because people often have logistics questions: In Evernote, I have a notebook stack called Logbooks, then an individual Notebook called 2025 and each week is a note, titled by the date of the last day of the week. For example, this week’s note is 25-1-18. I use this title format so it sorts automatically in numerical order in the notebook.