Most status updates answer a question nobody asked. They report what somebody has been busy with. What everyone actually wants to know is whether the thing is going to land, and what has changed since last time.
Busy is not a status. It is an alibi.
Here is the shape that works, in three lines. Where it stands against the expected finish. What changed since the last update. What you need, from whom, by when.
The difference is easy to see. The old version: worked on the reporting export, had some issues with the date handling, also reviewed two pull requests and joined the migration call. The new version: reporting export still on track for Thursday. The timezone handling turned out worse than we thought, so the CSV format is now the risk rather than the query. I need thirty minutes with Priya on Tuesday to confirm the format, otherwise Thursday becomes Monday.
The second one is shorter, and it lets four other people make decisions without asking you a single follow up question.
A few habits that make it easy.
Lead with the date and the confidence. On track, at risk, or slipped. People are scanning for that word and the rest is detail.
Give them the diff, not the whole project. Your reader has the previous update. Repeating it buries the one thing that moved.
Put the ask inside the update, with a name and a day attached. Blocked is not a status either. Blocked on a decision from Marco by Wednesday is a status.
And put a slip in writing the day you believe it, rather than the day it becomes undeniable. The extra week of quiet never helps you and it costs everyone else their options.
Three minutes to write, and it saves the meeting somebody was about to schedule to find out the same thing. Write it for a busy person who cares about the outcome and remembers none of the details.
That person is usually your manager. Quite often it is you, three weeks from now, trying to work out what on earth happened.
– Asael Shinder
