The first week
The End of the First Week
An hour on the first Friday, spent looking back rather than forward, is worth more than any amount of effort during the week itself.
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.
Before adding another mandatory check-in, it helps to take a closer look at the platform and see whether the real issue is unclear ownership, missing access, or an overloaded first-week schedule.
For a separate career or employment reference, consult U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
What the first week actually cost, totalled on the Friday
Waiting for repository access
11 hanswer: 3 minYou waited because you did not want to be the new person who complains. Three days
The staging database would not take your password
3 hanswer: 4 minYou waited because you could not tell whose job it was. Half a day
Not knowing what to do between induction sessions
6 hanswer: 4 minYou waited because it felt like something you should work out. Spread over three days
Not knowing which branch to start from
4 hanswer: 2 minYou waited because everybody else seemed busy. An afternoon
four occasions · 24 hours spent stuck · 13 minutes of answers · the longest single wait was 11 hours
Twenty-four hours of a first week spent waiting, and thirteen minutes of answers. The purpose of adding this up on the Friday is not to feel bad about it; it is to see that none of the four was difficult. One person's own first week.
Spend half an hour on your first Friday looking backwards. It is the most useful half hour of the week and almost nobody spends it.
The four questions
What did I actually do? Write it down. For most first weeks the honest answer is: set up accounts, read things, met people, fixed one small thing. That is a complete and normal first week, and seeing it written removes a good deal of the unease that accumulates when nothing is written.
What am I still blocked on? Everything not yet granted, not yet answered, not yet arranged. This becomes Monday's first message.
What did I not understand? The confusion list, consolidated.
Who did I meet, and who should I meet next? The beginning of the map that the next section is about.
The message to send
One short message to your manager, on the Friday, unprompted.
First week done. I have got accounts for everything except the billing dashboard, read back through the last fortnight of the team's channels, and fixed the setup instructions, which had two dead steps in them.
Still outstanding: billing access, and I am not sure yet who I should be asking about pricing questions.
Next week I would like to pick up something small and real if there is anything going.
Three short paragraphs: what you did, what is blocked, what you want next. It takes four minutes to write.
Why it is worth sending
Because your manager cannot see any of it.
They do not know whether you have spent the week productively or sat in silence; they do not know what is still missing; and in the absence of information most managers assume the first week went fine and move on, which leaves your blockers in place for another week.
It also establishes a rhythm. A short Friday note in week one makes a short Friday note in week six ordinary, and by week twelve you have a written record of your own first quarter that nobody had to ask you for. The last section explains why that turns out to matter.
Adding up the week
Do the arithmetic once, for yourself, and then stop doing it.
The panel above is one person's first week: twenty-four hours of waiting against thirteen minutes of answers. The point of adding it up is not self-reproach. It is to see, in a form that cannot be argued with, that none of the four was a difficult problem.
That is what makes the twenty-minute rule stick. An argument does not; a number from your own week does.
What a normal first week looks like
Worth stating plainly, because almost everybody joining remotely suspects theirs was unusually bad.
Some accounts work and some do not. You attend several meetings and follow about half of one. You meet between four and ten people and remember three. You produce nothing, or one small thing. You spend a noticeable fraction of the week with nothing to do and feel guilty about it.
That is the ordinary case. It is not a sign of a bad employer, and it is certainly not a sign that you were a mistake.
The one thing to carry into week two
Of everything in this section, the thing to actually change on Monday is the timer.
Twenty minutes, then ask. The first week's waiting happened because there was no rule, and a rule is the only thing that survives the particular pressure of being new.
Doing it on Friday rather than Monday
The same half hour on a Monday morning is worth a fraction as much.
By Monday the week has become a general impression. The specific things — which step of the setup failed, which name you could not place, what you were waiting for on Wednesday — have gone, and what is left is a feeling about how it went.
Feelings about how a first week went are almost always worse than the facts, for the reasons the rest of this section describes, and a review conducted on a feeling produces nothing actionable.
Friday afternoon, while the week is still in front of you, produces a list. The list is what the message to your manager is made of, and it is also what you will want in week twelve when somebody asks how the onboarding went and you can no longer remember any of it.
The second Friday
Do it again, and then keep doing it.
The second one takes four minutes rather than thirty, because the format exists and most of the questions have the same answers. By the fourth it is a habit and by week twelve you have a complete record of a quarter that nobody asked you to keep.
The temptation to stop arrives around week five, when the week has started to feel ordinary and there is apparently nothing to report. That is exactly the week worth recording, because it is the first one that looked like the job rather than like onboarding.