One of the challenges of working from home or remotely is the lack of synchronous meetings. Many times that it that impromptu meeting in the hall or just being able to walk over and chat to someone or pick their brain. Also lost in that mix, in my opinion is my ability to keep up with everything that is going on in students and postdocs day to day operations. I use standing weekly meetings to try to keep on top of all the things but don’t believe I am capturing all the significant operations that folks are up to. Therefore, I am requiring folks in my lab that have a standing meeting, usually on Fridays to adopt the template linked here.
The template is like a meeting agenda and is something that has been used in other remote working situations. But it has been updated and modified to be more specific and focused. The first run at it will likely be a bit of a task but it is intended to be a living document where each week you can copy and paste your previous week’s information and update it quickly. It is not intended to micromanage folks but to assist me in how I need to prioritize and allocate my time as it provides a quick reference as to what is needed from me and what to expect from you.
The template has 4 sections. It is intended that you stick to the format and sections but if you think a modification is needed we can discuss.
The 4 sections are with some associated guidelines
The section descriptions and guidelines are for this template here.
- What are my objectives/tasks for the upcoming week (i.e., what will I do).
- This section provides something you plan to accomplish over the next week and should be discrete enough to update on the next standing meeting. It should not be vague, like “Study maximum likelihood methods” or “read about yield per recruit models”. Those might be something you do as part of your day to day personal development but not necessary in this context.
- In this section you should include
- estimated amount of time to accomplish,
- the expected outcome or deliverable with a date of completion,and
- if supervisor (e.g., me) review is needed and if so what level.
- Levels include:
- Discussion-we can discuss at our standing meeting or by phone call
- Code review-do you need me to review some code you did for an analysis?
- Text review-do you need me to review some text
- Outcomes of previous week’s objectives
- What did I accomplish related to your previous week’s objectives and task?
- Keep it brief, if you used SMART objectives you should be able to simply put yes or no.
- What is the holdup
- Report anything that might be limiting progress which is related to a ‘no’ in section 2.
- This might be related to:
- issues you ran into that are making you take longer than expected to complete your objective or task,
- you are waiting in input from collaborators, or
- you are waiting in input from me.
- Important dates
- Dates you tentatively plan to be out sampling and where
- Upcoming meeting (e.g., AFS)
- Upcome degree deadlines
Some additional guidelines
- Save your weekly update as a descriptive and static file name. Do not change the file name from week to week, I will simply be overwriting these files in my workflow.
- Update your weekly update by copying and pasting the previous week to the top. That way it is easy to see the previous week.
- Send by email to me the day of our standing meeting, preferably in the morning.
- Be prepared to discuss your weekly update at our standing meeting, especially what you are proposing for objectives and tasks from the upcoming week.