Managing people over time
The hard part of managing people happens between the meetings. Advice covers the meetings well enough — the one-on-one, the review, the feedback you rehearse on the walk to the room — and then you form a read on someone, you mean to come back to it, and the next sprint closes over it. By the time it matters, at a review or a promotion call or a hard conversation, you're working from the last few weeks and treating them as the whole story.
These pages are about holding that read somewhere other than your own memory, where recency and noise wear it down. You write what you believe about each person as a plain sentence, say how sure you are in plain words, note what you notice when you notice it, and let the read change on the record instead of in your head. It never becomes a score on anyone, and it stays private. After a few months the page shows how the read got there and when it moved, not only what you ended up concluding.
If you've just made the jump, start with going from engineer to manager, then the day-to-day practice of keeping track of your reports; the 1:1 notes template has the fields ready to copy. If a review is bearing down, recency bias in performance reviews is the one to read, and the ten-question test will tell you how current your picture is before you write a word. There's a walkthrough of doing this in Notion and where a notes app stops keeping up, and, for the point where the roster outgrows what memory reliably holds, how many direct reports is too many. When the review itself is due, writing it from your notes is its own page, and keeping notes on the people you manage covers what belongs in the file, who can read it, and where it should live.
From engineer to manager
Going from engineer to manager: the part that gets no training is holding a current read on six or eight people at once, with memory as the only storage.
4 min read
How to keep track of your direct reports
A light habit for keeping an evolving read on each direct report: what to write down, how to let it change on the record, and how to keep the notes fair.
6 min read
A 1:1 notes template
A 1:1 notes template for managers: the meeting note, what I noticed about the person, and the read I revise later. Works on paper or in any notes app.
5 min read
Recency bias in performance reviews
Why the last few weeks dominate a performance review, what the research does and doesn't show, and the cheap habit that gives you the whole arc back.
5 min read
Managing your team in Notion
A simple Notion setup for keeping notes on the people you manage, the two things it does well, and the point where a flat notes tool stops keeping up.
5 min read
How well do you know your team?
Ten questions to answer from memory about someone you manage, how to check your answers, and what the age of your evidence says about your read of them.
4 min read
How many direct reports is too many?
Where the folklore numbers for span of control come from, what actually breaks as a team grows, and how to keep a real read on nine direct reports, not four.
6 min read
Writing a performance review from your notes
How to write a performance review from your 1:1 notes: the sweep, sorting observations from reads, writing the arc, and feedback that lands on the work.
7 min read
Keeping notes on the people you manage
Keeping notes on employees, fairly: what belongs in them, who can legally read them in the EU, UK and US, where they should live, and when to prune them.
6 min read
Full disclosure: I make Continuum, a Mac app for exactly this practice. You write beliefs about the people you manage and revise them over time, with every earlier version kept underneath; you tag what you notice, and those notes fade unless you see the same thing again, so what surfaces is what's current; and it opens on the reads that have gone stale and the people you haven't written about in weeks. It never scores anyone, nothing leaves your Mac, and it's free for up to three people, with Pro a one-time purchase if you'd rather not subscribe. Everything on these pages works in a plain document too, and the pages say where.