The first week
Keeping a Record From Day One
A document kept from the first day costs two minutes an evening and is the only way to hold on to what you could see before the place became normal.
What the people on this page had to find out, and where from
Which of the two deploy guides is current
worked out6Decided by checking which matched the scripts
That nobody reads the team channel after 15:00
worked out7Learned from two unanswered afternoons
two things you had to know · nobody told you any of them · the median arrived in week 7 · all two you went and got
Two things nobody told anybody, learned by noticing. Both were visible in week one and neither was legible until much later.
A fair pilot begins with a baseline rather than a guess; managers can see the workflow in detail and compare the first weeks before and after changing documentation or support.
The wider workplace question can also be checked against resources from Built In.
Eight things from one record, and the week each stopped being strange
That nobody reads the team channel after 15:00
worked out7Noted as odd in week one and accepted as normal by week eight
That there are two deploy guides
worked out6Noted in week one; by week six you had a habit that routed around it
That the Thursday meeting has no agenda
told5Somebody explained it was historical
That the design review is where decisions happen
worked out8Noted in week two as a guess and confirmed in week eight
That two people do not speak to each other
worked out11Noticed late and would never have been said aloud
Why the retry limit is three
you asked9Asked once the question had sat in the list for a month
That the handbook contradicts the induction
written down3Found by reading both, which nobody else had done recently
That nobody can say what the fourth product is for
you asked4Three people gave three answers
eight things you had to know · one of them somebody told you · the median arrived in week 7 · the other seven you went and got
Eight entries from a record kept daily in the first fortnight. Six of them had stopped looking strange by week eight, and without the dated list none of the six would have been recoverable. One person's own twelve weeks.
Open a document on your first morning. Put the date at the top. Write in it for two minutes at the end of every day for a fortnight.
That is the whole practice, and it is the most valuable thing in this section.
What goes in it
Four kinds of line, and no attempt at tidiness.
Words you did not understand. Every acronym, every internal name, every tool. This list will be thirty items long by Friday and most of it resolves itself within a month.
Names, with what the person does. You will meet twenty people in a fortnight and remember four. The list is how you get the other sixteen back.
Things that confused you. Not things you did not know — things that seemed contradictory, or arbitrary, or oddly difficult.
Things that surprised you. The most valuable category and the one that empties fastest.
Why the dates matter
Because the point of the record is the comparison with later.
An undated list of observations is a list of opinions. A dated list is evidence of when you could still see something, and it is the only instrument that survives the thing this site keeps returning to: within about six weeks you will have stopped noticing almost everything on it.
What it is for
Three uses, in order of how soon they arrive.
This week: the question list. Most of what you write down is answerable cheaply, and having it written means you can ask four things at once instead of interrupting somebody four times.
Month two: finding your feet. Reading back over week one in week five is a reliable corrective to the feeling that you are not progressing. The list of things you did not understand in week one will be almost entirely resolved, and you will not have noticed it happening.
Month three: the only honest answer. Somebody will ask how your onboarding went, or what would help the next person. Without the record you will say it was fine, because by then it was. With it you have thirty dated lines.
Keep it private
This is a note to yourself, not a document for anybody else.
That matters, because the moment it might be read it stops containing the useful entries. "Nobody can explain what the fourth product is for" is a legitimate thing to have observed in week two and a poor thing to have written in a shared space in week two.
If you later want to pass on a version of it, write a second document. Do not sanitise the first one.
What to do with the entries that persist
In week six, read it. Most entries will have dissolved. A handful will still look strange to you.
Those few are worth something, because you are now in the last part of the window in which you can see them and still have the standing to mention them. What to do with them is the subject of a note in the last section, and the short version is: one or two, offered as questions rather than criticisms, to one person.
The version for people who will not keep a document
Some people will not, and a practice that depends on daily discipline has a short life.
The minimum that still works: a single message to yourself in whatever chat tool you use, whenever something puzzles you. No structure, no evening ritual, no tidying. It is worse than a proper document and it is enormously better than nothing, because the thing being preserved is not organisation — it is the date.
What a fortnight of it looks like
Four lines a day, and most of them one sentence.
- Day 1. What is a "lane"? Met Priya — runs releases, I think. Nobody said what to do between the calls.
- Day 3. Two deploy guides. Neither says which is current.
- Day 4. Test suite takes forty minutes. Nobody mentions this.
- Day 7. Nothing answered after three in the afternoon. Is that a rule or a habit?
- Day 9. The handbook and the induction disagree about expenses.
Thirty or forty lines by the end of the fortnight, most of them resolved within a month and six of them still standing in week eight.
The six are the point. Everything else is scaffolding that lets you find them, and there is no way to identify which six in advance — which is why the whole fortnight has to be written down rather than only the interesting parts.