Nobody asks how your week went

In a job, somebody asks. A standup, a one-to-one, a manager who says "how's the launch going?" in the corridor. You might hate it. It still does something useful: it makes you compare what you said with what happened, out loud, on a schedule.

Work for yourself and that question disappears. Nobody plans your day. Nobody asks on Friday whether the landing page shipped. You can spend a month telling yourself the product is "nearly there", and the only person who could object is you.

The plan is rarely what's missing

Most solo founders and people building something after work are good at plans. A board, a roadmap, a list of next week's tasks written with real conviction on Sunday night.

What's missing is the second half of the loop: checking the plan against what you actually did. That half turns out to have a surprisingly strong body of evidence behind it.

What 138 experiments say about checking

In 2016, Benjamin Harkin and colleagues pulled together 138 experiments, with almost 20,000 participants, for a meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin. The question was simple: if you get people to monitor their progress toward a goal, do they get closer to it?

They do. Prompting people to monitor their progress improved what they did and made them more likely to reach the goal. Two details matter if you work alone. The effect was bigger when progress was physically recorded, and bigger again when it was reported to someone else.

A vague feeling on Sunday that the week went "fine" is neither of those. It isn't written down, and nobody else ever sees it.

"When X, I will Y" beats "this week I'll"

The other half of the research is about how a plan is phrased. Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran reviewed 94 tests of what they call implementation intentions: plans in the form "when X happens, I will do Y". Across more than 8,000 people, those plans improved goal attainment over simply intending to do the thing, with an effect size of d = 0.65. In behaviour research, that's large.

"Ship the pricing page this week" is a goal. "Tuesday morning, before email, I write the pricing copy" is a plan with a cue attached. The second one is also far easier to check on Sunday, because it either happened or it didn't.

Build the check-in nobody gives you

None of this needs software. A paper notebook works if you actually use it. You need three things:

• A written plan with cues. A few goals for the month, a handful of objectives for the week, concrete tasks for today.
• A record made at the time. Not a reconstruction on Friday evening, when everything blurs into "worked on the product".
• A fixed day when the two are compared. On a schedule, with the misses named, not skipped because the week felt busy.

That's the loop Whatcha Doing runs. You write the plan on Monday. During the week it interrupts you, asks what you just did, and you type one line. On Sunday it reads the log against your plan and tells you whether you kept your word, with a score out of 10 and one thing to change next week.

It isn't a co-founder. It is the question a co-founder would have asked.

Working alone means nobody checks. It doesn't mean nobody should.

Sources

• Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., et al. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2).
• Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38.