Week Notes Origins

Having seen discourse on bubbles.town about bloggers using week notes and it being seen as positive and negative (can we have better titles) so thought I would document the origins of the week notes term and my WeakNotes alternative.

During the 2010s the Government Digital Service era Digital Service became an evolution, or revolution perhaps, of making services digital first and by working in the open by default. Services at the time were not accessible and the original staff set about making and showing the thing. The great work over the years were based on a set of principles. Fundamentally this was about working in the open, to show mistakes, learnings and change as it happened and documenting the progress.

Effectively weak notes are like individual sprint reviews, the 2010s were for me when the agile software development methodology and mentality really flourished in the UK, and latterly faded during the pandemic and the advent of more remote working environments and the nascent AI adoption. It is not surprising then that thought leaders and standard setters of working publicly used techniques to document progress.

Matt Webb had a pre-history of week notes

One weeknote is just one week’s worth of effort, summarised. Useful! But an archive of dozens or hundreds of weeknotes, stretching back through time - months, perhaps years - is a fabulous repository of thoughts, ideas and decisions. It’s a time machine that helps the team themselves, or their bosses or stakeholders, look back over recent history to work out why and how things are as they are. Much, much more useful!

• Giles Turnbull sums up the value of week notes

Matt Jukes created the Weeknot.es site to collate and share these collections of weekly updates.

My website is named “weak notes” as a play on words of the popular style, with acknowledgement that my posts will be irregular and inconsistent due largely to my disability.

I am more likely to click on a week notes blog post then something with a more specific title that I can ascertain is not something I’m interested in and obviously skippable, whereas a weekly summary will potentially give me much more insight and perhaps link to something I am interested in, or give me hints about a persons ideas, character or work. Especially those that are rough bullets or a few links as it’s much easier to digest and understand. I have added around 20 new RSS feeds to my reader from people who have had interesting weeks that caught my attention.

Overall it’s just a mechanism to summarise the week and I’m happy it exists.