As it turns out, when this was posted he’d already sent that email a few days earlier.

I have to admit to being somewhat surprised by the backlash against government employees being requested to list five accomplishments from their past week. A recent example is a meme demanding that:

Elon needs to send an email to all Americans explaining why the rocket failed If he cannot do that by tomorrow morning, he should consider himself fired.

At the time this was posted, Musk had already sent this email. You could easily run a search on “why did the Space X rocket fail?” and get back several news stories each with the same quotes from Space X. It very clearly had been sent through the various public relations services that generate, among other things, emails to journalists for delivering news to the American people.

And, I’d add, learning the reasons the rocket failed were accomplishments. Were Space X subject to this rule (which it may well be), that launch easily resulted in five accomplishments on its own for every employee involved.

The response was that “a list isn’t the whole picture” and “I… would struggle to list five things because that’s how jobs are sometimes.”

I used to work at a private university. Due to both weird funding mechanisms and just the kind of people who get into management even at private colleges, higher education employment is a very weird amalgam of private business and government work. Our combination of information silos, funding silos, dysfunctional management, and a complete ignorance of customers was very reminiscent of Mike Judge’s^• wonderful Office Space^•.

Including the paperwork involved. I have very little sympathy with people who are unwilling to list five things accomplished in the last week in a simple email. While I’ve never quite had to deal with TPS report cover sheets I would have jumped at the chance to replace our six-page job evaluations with “Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week”.

Every page has a signature. That nearly empty page is only a signature, to affirm that I have discussed the other signed pages with my supervisor. Instead of a cover sheet, it’s an under sheet. But at least it’s not a TPS report.

If I had successfully convinced our employer to go that route, I probably would have listed it as an accomplishment.¹

Too many federal employees, however, are acting more like a Tom Smykowski than a Peter Gibbons, as if they know their position is unjustifiable. A simple weekly bullet list is not difficult, nor is it meant to be a “full picture”. All it’s meant to be is a snapshot of what’s going on in a department that week. Had I been lucky enough to be in an environment that encouraged useful task list-style paperwork instead of Office Space^•-style reports, my accomplishment list could, for a typical week, be something like this:

That was not a struggle. I put those down in less than thirty seconds, and that’s from a perspective long removed from my last week of work. In real life it would have taken another thirty seconds at most to type the full names of each of the items. Listing these items would have been a satisfying minute at the end of any week. It would be beat the hell out of my multi-page evaluation, or filling out a cover sheet for every TPS report for every accomplishment as it happens.²

If I were unlucky enough to have gotten the request at a time when the server wasn’t stable for the last week, I would have used that issue’s resolution, or lack thereof, as an accomplishment. Whatever work I did on it is something I accomplished. Hopefully I made progress toward a solution. If not, I would certainly have made progress ruling out some solutions. Which is why the Space X incident would have easily delivered several accomplishments for the employees involved. Learning from setbacks is an accomplishment.

An atypical week is even easier, if less satisfying, because each reason it was atypical will generate multiple accomplishments.

Weekly accomplishments are not all “on Tuesday I built the Taj Mahal, on Wednesday the Tower of Piza, on Thursday I adjusted the tower to lean south and turned it into a lucrative tourist attraction.”

If every day is an advance of inches, then you list those inches. The question wasn’t what have you completed it was what have you accomplished. I can guarantee you that the owner of SpaceX understands the importance of inches in reaching a goal of light-minutes. And that the co-author of The Art of the Deal^• understands the importance of securing small agreements to locking in big agreements.

If your department is a culture where you cannot even accurately claim progress in inches, rewrite Peter Gibbon’s speech in Office Space. The President might not recognize the reference, but I’m pretty sure his appointee will. Seriously, though, you might consider whether you should get out of such a dysfunctional environment ASAP, before you end up torching the place in frustration.