[vvanders]

Pretty decent list, as someone who's full-time remote let me add one more:

At the end of the day send your manager a quick email of what you did and things that happened. You shouldn't spend more than 5 minutes and there's never an expectation of a reply but it's a great way to fill them in and augment the in-person conversations that happen in the office.

[biomcgary]

As someone who is a remote manager of remote colleagues, I would ask any employee giving me a daily update to stop. It is one more distraction and I prefer to evaluate people for their long-term productivity rather than daily. I may be an outlier though.

[karatestomp]

Currently dealing with remote work involving daily manager updates (manager in “stand ups” that are, as is often the case, not really stand ups but just telling your manager what you did) and no real project management/planning. Didn’t realize just how important 1) not having your actual, personal manager in your project stand ups and 2) week or longer planned-out targets for completing things sorted out by a real project manager were to my happiness (and productivity). Stressful as fuck.

[kfarr]

Sounds like the problem is with your manager. IMHO a good manager is more than welcome in project management and update meetings and should be a helper to get things done, not a stressor.

[karatestomp]

I think maybe if project management and “stakeholder” status weren’t also effectively done by the manager it might make it OK. I got spoiled by a few years at a place with outstanding project management and it’s taking some adjustment to go back to so loose a style.

[smcameron]

For many years, I used to have a little html file I called "log.html" (just plain html) and at the end of every day before I left, I'd add a section at the top, dated, separated with a horizontal rule <hr>, with notes about what I did that day, and also little things I learned. When it came time to make my weekly status report, I'd refer back to it. I could also search through it and find various bits of information I'd written down. And if other people wondered what I'd been up to, they could look at it too.

[raister]

Yes. I do this. In Gdocs though, name is productivity, where I add the day in format [dd/mm/yyyy] followed by bullets points on things I thought and did during the day. It also helps me to wrap my mind around in the following weeks, like, what was I thinking? then I go back to the log, and remember the trail of thought leading to my decisions. It is quite worth a while doing this I reckon.

[biomcgary]

Keeping notes and referencing them as needed in periodic one-on-one meetings is very helpful.

[rovr138]

Huh

There’s a project called TiddlyWiki[0] Would work great for this.

[0] - https://tiddlywiki.com/

[zwayhowder]

I'm with you on that. If my staff needed to send me a daily summary I'd worry I'd hired the wrong staff.

However it's not a bad idea to keep a worklog for yourself. Just jot down a sentence for new tasks and then a rough time frame. Just so if anyone does ask next week what you did last Monday you've got some idea. (General advice, not just WFH advice).

[vvanders]

That's fair enough, it's something that's worked well for me and I find it handy for giving visibility into smaller things that I might not email/im about and would get lost in the mix.

[throwaway98797]

Some may perceive this as weakness.

[lnsru]

You are an outlier. There were more managers, that wanted to know how I spent every hour of the day than these with long time goals.

[nottorp]

Last time shit like that was required in a job i had i always ended it with "and i spent the last hour of the day writing my daily report".

If your manager can't evaluate your performance based on what you do not what you say, it may be better to change the manager.

[leetcrew]

daily reports are obviously bullshit. a lot of days I would have nothing to say but "I tried 8 things and none of them worked".

on the flip side, regular reports on a more reasonable schedule can be good for the employee. sometimes I'll spend a whole week hard at work investigating/testing different approaches to fix some bug and end up submitting a one-line change. without the backstory, it might look like I sat on my hands all week and started work friday afternoon.