The Weekly Success List

My latest obsession: the weekly success list.

A few people on the team like to make fun of my ever-growing love for lists. Don’t care what the haters think — I love them. And the weekly success list in particular is such a remarkably simple way to over-communicate priorities and hold the team accountable.

But first, some context.

beehiiv has grown up a bit — we’re now 75 employees scattered across nearly a dozen different countries. Despite having a bunch of different teams and processes in place… we’re still moving a million miles per second.

For me personally, my day-to-day still feels like we’re back in the grittiest earliest days of the company. The days are just an ever-evolving game of context switching from one problem to the next: launching the next initiative, putting out the current fire, resolving the latest escalation. One step forward, one step backwards.

Monday through Friday I am entirely in it: 5:30am wakeup, gym, at my desk by 8am, and blocking and tackling until about 9 or 10pm each night. Repeat.

Balanced lifestyle? Not exactly.

Worth it? Absolutely.

I love building this company, it’s the most challenging and gratifying thing I’ve ever done. And fortunately the numbers speak for themselves — we launched just 2.5 years ago and are currently on pace to do $20M in revenue this year.

Anyway, all that context was more to give you a glimpse into my state of mind on any given day (chaos). I’m sure most founders reading this can relate.

By the time Friday afternoon rolls around I typically find a moment to decompress and think back on the week. And more often than not, I have absolutely no idea if the week was a successful one or not. It typically looks like…

Is that a good week? I really don’t know.

And as the sobering realization settles in that it’s a Friday afternoon and the week was what the week was… I can pretty easily identify everything that’s stressing me out.

So I began compiling a list of things that, if completed, would solve our current problems and push forward the progression of the business.

Thus, the weekly success list was born. A compilation of the top priorities, initiatives, and milestones we need to accomplish in the upcoming week for it to objectively be considered a success.

It sounds so remarkably simple, but by formalizing the process, it has provided a tremendous amount of clarity and alignment across the organization. The last sentence reads like something in a corporate training program… but I’m keeping it.

Slack just so happened to launch their new Lists feature around the same time I began formalizing this. So here is how it looks in practice…

Each week I create a new List in Slack that consists of the top priorities and initiatives across the company, and assign who is responsible for each.

I share the list with the team via email, pin it to our main Slack channel, and update it in real-time throughout the week. By the end of the week it looks a little something like this…

Since starting the company, I have always spent about an hour each Sunday writing an update to the entire team. We’re entirely remote, so this email is a mechanism to re-align everyone on the top priorities, issues, metrics, etc. heading into the new week.

Since launching the weekly success lists I also include:

Again, I’m aware this isn’t rocket science, but it’s been so remarkably effective for our team (and for my own mental sanity).

Ultimately, the weekly success lists are a forcing function for the following:

Two weeks ago I wrote a deep-dive about the framework we utilize to run the business, called Traction. Here’s how I described it in a single, over-simplified sentence:

While the Traction process is typically owned by the leadership team, the weekly success list is a simple way to stretch the accountability to everyone on the team.

Long story short: just create more lists. They’re awesome 👍🏾.

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Shoutout Omar for probably the most realistic and detailed reader submission to date — there’s even tons of tangled wires behind the desk.

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