Wrapping up each work week by sharing a highlight

Do you have an end-of-the-work-week ritual that helps you enter weekend mode?

In the book “The making of a manager” Julie Zhuo describes her end-of-the-week habit. She reflects on her past week and lists what she’s satisfied or dissatisfied with to send as a “Thoughts on my week”-email to her team.

It sounded good and I set out to try this approach. I drafted my first “Thoughts on my week” consisting on a couple of learnings and things I wanted to focus on improving next week. Just when I was about to share it with the team, I had second thoughts about it. While this exercise allowed me to do a braindump and get things out of my head before the weekend, I realized that some of the thoughts I’d written down could potentially spark others in the team to start thinking about new work things. That felt counterproductive to the intention I had with an end-of-the-work-week ritual. I wanted it to create a habit of winding down and getting into a weekend mode mindset. And not just for myself.

So I decided on something else.

At the end of the work week I reflect on the week that has past and pick out one highlight that I’m happy about, which I share with the team.

We are a remote-friendly workplace so I share this highlight as a simple Slack message in our team’s channel. I invite everyone in the team to join in to reflect and pick one highlight from their week to share as well. Since our team of product designers all work in different cross-functional teams during most of their times, this is also another way to get a glimpse into each other’s past week and celebrate our successes together.

Picking out a highlight and sharing it, is an opportunity to wrap up the work week on a happy note and enter the weekend by giving each other a high-five and a pat on the back.

I’ve done this end-of-work-week highlight sharing with the team three times now, so I consider it a tradition.