Write About What You’ve Learned Lately
Chances are, you’re never not learning. Why not write about it?
When you write about what you’ve learned lately, three things happen:
- You give others a chance to benefit from your detours and discoveries
- You mark your own progress, building satisfaction and momentum
- You celebrate the process of learning itself, implicitly inviting others to do the same
Since 2011, I’ve occasionally published a newsletter titled “What I’ve Learned Lately.” (The archives are here on Medium.) Looking to translate the “show your work” ethos to the workplace, I’ve long intended to do something similar on the job. Joining Quip as a product manager gave me the fresh start I’d been waiting for.
At the end of my first week at Quip—a small startup in San Francisco that’s building a big open place for teams to write stuff down and get things done—I reserved half an hour on Friday afternoon to write up what I’d learned over the past five days. I decided to keep it light, opting for bullet points instead of paragraphs. (Otherwise, the exercise could have easily taken me hours; I’ve learned that the hard way.) Riffing on TIL—“today I learned,” one of my favorite internet abbreviations—I titled the doc “TWIL (This Week I Learned…),” set it to be visible to everyone in the company, and pasted a link into the all-company chat room.
The doc looked something like this:
My colleagues—all 30+ of them—responded warmly to the doc, which was an encouraging way to end my first week. Buoyed by their support, I’ve updated it every Friday since. Because Quip helps teams keep tabs on docs as they evolve, my “TWIL” document casually shows up in my coworkers’ feeds whenever I update it; that dynamic helps me to trust that they’ll have the opportunity to click through if they’re interested.
Beyond the usual benefits of writing about what I’ve learned lately, I’ve discovered a few more in the workplace context:
- Looking ahead to Friday’s bullet point bonanza motivates me to generate “things to link to” as the day approaches. In practice, this means that I’m documenting assumptions, how-to’s, and observations much better than I ever have before.
- Quip’s @ mentions feature lets me thank coworkers by name in a way that I trust to reach them. I’ve stripped out the @ mentions in the public version, but here’s what they look like in-line:
- Articulating what I’m learning in a forum where I can share proprietary findings without a second thought has made it clear how much of what I learn at work every week isn’t proprietary at all. Sharing the non-proprietary findings with the world is then just a matter of editing words that are already there—infinitely easier and more natural than a staring match with a blank page.
Speaking of which—three weeks into the practice, having learned a few new things about the benefits of writing about what you’ve learned lately, I realized there was only one thing to do:
Write about it.
