Hey, this is the Daily Overpass. My name is Eric and I make apps..
Now today, I want to talk about the Daily Summary.
Okay, so today I want to tell you, guys, about the daily summary. The daily summary- if there's one
thing my team is probably sick of hearing about is the daily summary
because that's one of the my my things I obsess about when I hire people is that
at the end of every day or you know sometimes they do at the beginning of
the next thing but they just should do it at the end of the current day they
should take five minutes and make a list of everything they worked on during the
day make a list of everything that's been done during the day everything that
needs to be done the next day that they plan on doing the next day and if
they've had any problems with anything then they might need assistance with so
it's just a simple thing at the beginning we used to use email so like I
expected it a daily summary email at the end of every day that got to be
difficult because you know emails get lost everything so we start so I wrote
this really cool google script where it would send a document template every day
to everybody and they would fill that in and just went straight into Google Drive
and now we just use slack we use a channel on slack for daily summary so
everybody on the team does that and you know this is one of the things I found
really difficult with developers is you know when I hire someone I have like the
most the time when I've let somebody go and I've let doesn't I mean we hire and
let people go all the time I mean I've been through dozens of people already
and you know one of the biggest reasons I let somebody go is because they can't
get the daily summary down right they just you know they don't see the
importance of it or they just think it's it's not you know it's not that
important they just can't get their head around it so don't go days without doing
it and then they'll do like all of them in one day right and it's really
difficult because you know most people assume that well Eric told me to do this
project so he knows what I'm working on so I don't need to do the summary and I
say no you have to do at the end of every day I want some detail as to
what's been done in an eight hour shift right so you know and this is something
I used to do myself when I was working up when I was contracting especially
especially on days when I worked from home you know when you're not in an
office and you got somebody looking over your shoulder every five mizzen who were
you doing right then you just you feel you're at home for the entire
day an eight-hour shift so you kind of want to show that the sub value has been
happening as happened during the day or that you know you've moved you've moved
the ball forward like if you're on a project or if you're on you know
whatever you're doing so like I would take five minutes at the end of every
day and I would write down you know okay here's what I did today you know I
worked on on on this webpage or on this app right you know I've had a bit of
issues with this so I check these websites here you know uh had a bit of
issues then I moved on to this other project I spent two hours doing this I
spent one hour doing this here are the problems that I had today you know you
know it was for some reason you know the database connection that was supposed to
work wasn't working whatever and I will go through some of that so what we
resolved it by doing this and then I'll say what I plan on working the next day
which would be tomorrow you know the next day's usually gonna be resume
working on what I was working on whatever but it and I send this to to my
boss or when I was working a contract or send it to the person who hired me and
you know when I work in other jobs I would send it to to the manager whatever
and it was always it was it was always on the prefix of you do not have to read
this but I'm sending it to you in case you need to know right and this is one
thing if you ever want to do really well if you like working for other people
right if you like a contract or whatever and you want to be the last person that
they ever let go of be the daily summary guy I just send something through say
look I'm not adding to your email load I'm not spamming you do not have to read
this I'm not you know if I need something that needs your direct
immediate attention I will send it via some other means but this is my daily
summary of what what happens at the end during each day and then they it gives
it helps the person in charge feel like they they're in control of everything
because they they at least know what you're doing or even if they don't read
the emails they know that they can go back and read them whereas most people
don't do anything they just they assume though they know what I'm working on
because they assigned me the tasks right it's it's really like like I will ask
someone like when I let somebody go like I'll I'll say like okay you haven't done
a daily summary like four days what have you been doing over the four days and
they'll say something like I've been researching how to do so-and-so on the
project I'll be like so for four days you've
been doing research on this one problem and I said yes
and so 32 hours of research so let's say you looked at four web pages an hour
which would be like not a lot so you're saying you've looked at you know
hundreds of web pages you should be an expert by now is that is that really
what you've been doing and more often than not they don't really remember what
they've been doing they may have been working on when usually what happens
might what I suspect happens is you know when you get stuck like you get a
problem and you get to something and you start you know just go to this Google
spiral where you start you know you're spending hours in Stack Overflow or
whatever and you're just trying to figure stuff out and you don't want to
admit that you don't know don't know what the problem is amen I've been there
before this is where the reason why in the daily summary I say if you have any
trouble let me know because you don't want to be in that situation where you
know they spent hours and hours going or days going off on some problem which you
could probably you well you might be able to solve in minutes or at least be
able to to help with or at least you know what what the issues are right and
a lot and it's just the big thing that people have when they hire people is
just the feeling of being in the dark I don't know that's with me too right now
we're working with another company um they're doing some some work for us and
it's the same thing I said I want a daily summary every day it's just it's
really hard to get that out of them because they're like oh geez you wonder
you know what am I going to do so well you have you know if you worked on this
for eight hours I'm sure you have something you could talk about you put
in your daily summary Omni I'm not saying it has to be an essay I'm saying
it has to be bullet points right and it's a it's really hard it isn't
something my dad told me what to do to do actually he said was it and the Navy
was a captain in the Navy he would say you know we're going up the ranks he
said he would always just do like a five minute summary each day and send it off
to the the commander whenever a person above them right and so they always knew
it was going on so they might not know what everybody else was doing but they
always knew like I don't need to worry about him cuz he knows he knows what
he's doing right so anyway daily sir I just want to let you guys know that
that's kind of how we run things here you know I've let so many people go
because they don't just a daily summary and it's just like
they could be like let me one guy was just he was so technically brilliant
right and he was doing he seemed to be doing really good work but he just
really got lazy with the daily summary to the point where I thought I assume
he's working on this stuff but he's not doing the summary anymore he just
thought I don't know what he's working on
like when he leaves for the day he's no longer available I'm thinking I don't
even know where we are with this project right if you're the person in charge
especially when we do work for clients like and the client calls me up and says
where are we with this I need to know where it's going so anyway that's it so
for those of you who do hire people like you hire remote teams I highly suggest
that you do you you implement this daily summary habit within everybody if you do
work for clients you know try to this is up with clients I'm not so good at this
because a lot of times like a day will go when we're not working on one playas
project because we've got another you know client that we need to work on but
but we do try to like keep clients updated on a daily basis - so if you do
work for clients if you can just get dropped them a note each day saying hey
here's what we did today we did this this and this I'll update you again
tomorrow you don't need to read this email but if you want to it's here right
and and if you work for somebody else if you just started doing that you would be
the you be the star of the team you know after a while so anyway that's it for
today and I hope that's been useful it might be a bit boring but that's it for
today I'll talk to you guys tomorrow