The first week
Writing Down What Confused You
Confusion in a first fortnight is data with a short shelf life, and the only way to keep it is to write it down on the day it happens.
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.
To keep remote-work decisions transparent, teams can open the official website and agree together how the resulting information will be used during onboarding and review.
New employees and managers can compare this approach with guidance available from IRS.
Six entries from one week's confusion list, and what became of each
Two deploy guides, neither marked current
worked out6Resolved by checking which matched the scripts; the guides are still both there
The induction says one thing and the handbook another
written down3Reported, and the handbook was corrected
The fourth product, which nobody could explain
you asked4Three people gave three answers, and that was the finding
Nobody answers the channel after three o'clock
worked out7Never raised; simply learned
The setup instructions do not work any more
worked out1Fixed by you in week two, which was your first contribution
The Thursday meeting with no agenda
told5Explained as historical by somebody who also found it odd
six things you had to know · one of them somebody told you · the median arrived in week 5 · the other five you went and got
Six entries from a first fortnight. One became a correction, one became your first contribution, one turned out to be a real finding, and three were simply absorbed. Nothing was wasted: the absorbing is what being new stops. One person's own twelve weeks.
Everything that confuses you in the first fortnight is worth a line in a document, because confusion is the one thing you have that nobody else in the organisation can get.
It also expires. Within about six weeks almost all of it will have turned into how things are, and you will not be able to remember that it was ever otherwise.
What counts as confusion
Not ignorance. Ignorance is normal and resolves by itself.
Confusion is the narrower thing: something that still does not make sense after it has been explained. Two documents that disagree. A process with a step nobody can justify. A meeting whose purpose nobody can state. A tool that everybody complains about and nobody has replaced.
The test is whether the explanation satisfied you. "I do not know what a lane is" is ignorance. "I have been told what a lane is twice and the two answers were different" is confusion, and it goes in the document.
What happens to the entries
Four fates, and all four are useful.
| Fate | Example | What it was worth |
|---|---|---|
| Answered | A word you did not know | Nothing much; it would have resolved anyway |
| Corrected | The handbook contradicts the induction | A small, real improvement, made by you |
| Confirmed as real | Nobody can say what a product is for | A finding, worth keeping to yourself for a while |
| Absorbed | Nobody answers after three | Nothing — and the absorbing is the point |
The fourth row is the interesting one. Most entries end there. You stop noticing, you develop a habit that routes around it, and the oddity joins the furniture.
That is not failure. It is what happening to everybody is, and the document exists so that a few of them do not.
When to raise one
Mostly, not yet.
A new person who arrives with a list of what is wrong is a familiar and unwelcome figure, and it does not matter that the list is correct. The section on the first ninety days covers the timing properly; the short version is that week eight is about right, one or two items at most, offered as questions.
The exceptions are small and concrete: a broken link, a wrong instruction, a document that contradicts itself. Those can be raised, or simply fixed, in week one, and they are a good way to be useful before you can do anything else.
The distinction that keeps you out of trouble
Between "this is wrong" and "I do not understand this".
The same observation phrased the first way is a verdict from somebody with two weeks of context. Phrased the second way it is a question, and it gets answered rather than resisted.
I may be missing something — there seem to be two deploy guides and I cannot tell which is current. Is one of them the real one?
If you are wrong, you find out cheaply. If you are right, somebody who can act on it now knows, and nobody has been told their work is deficient by a person who arrived a fortnight ago.
The entry that becomes your first contribution
In the panel above, one line — that the setup instructions no longer work — became the first useful thing the person did.
This is the most reliable path from confusion to contribution, and it is available in almost every organisation, because you are the only person who has followed the setup instructions recently. Everybody else did it years ago, from memory.
Fix it, quietly, and say so in one line. The section on first work is mostly about why that is a better opening than anything larger.
The entries that are about you
Some of what you write down in a first fortnight will not be about the organisation at all.
"I could not follow any of that meeting." "I have no idea whether what I did was any good." "I have not spoken to anybody for two days."
These are worth recording and they need handling differently from the rest. They are not observations about a place; they are the ordinary experience of being new, and almost every one of them stops being true by week six without anybody doing anything.
Reading them back in week eight is the most reliable reassurance available, and it is reassurance of a kind nobody else can give you, because nobody else saw week two.
What they are not is material for the conversation in the note on the closing window. That conversation is about the organisation. These entries are about a fortnight that has passed.