The status update writes itself

Monday, 16:40. A blank doc titled weekly update, and the dawning need to reconstruct a week you were too busy living to take notes on. You scroll Slack, you scroll mail, you check when that decision actually landed — and twenty minutes later you have four bullets you are not sure about.

You were there all week. So was Minne. Type the instruction into the blank doc — where does the Oslo move stand? — and tap right-Option. Minne pulls the last weeks together from its memory of what you actually did, and the instruction is replaced by the update itself: what moved, what was decided, what is still open, who is waiting on whom. Nothing lands in the doc until you press Insert.

The hard part of a status update was never the writing. It is the recall — and recall is exactly what a memory is for.

What a good status update contains

Not prose. The reader of a status update wants four things, briefly: what changed since last time, what was decided, what is blocked and on whom, and what happens next. The reason updates take so long to write is that all four are acts of memory scattered across a week of threads — which is why the worst updates are written last thing on Friday, from whatever still happens to be remembered.

Doing it with Minne

Minne keeps a wiki page per project, distilled every half hour from the work itself, with dates and citations back to where each fact was seen. An instruction in an empty field is a request against that memory:

where does the Oslo move stand?

three bullets on the billing migration, for Ada — she knows the background

The phrasing steers the shape: name the audience and the length and the draft honours them. This works in any text field — the doc, the email, the Slack thread where your manager just asked. The full instruction pattern is in Telling it what you want.

Edit, then insert

The draft appears in a panel, not in your document. Press ⇥ and steer it in plain words — shorter, lead with the risk — or ⌘E to edit it directly; press Return and it lands. A draft grounded in your memory also says so: a muted line underneath lists the pages it read, so you can see it drew on oslo-move and not on imagination. Details in The Minne key.

The same mechanism answers email — and when you only need the answer for yourself, skip the document entirely: press ⌥Space and ask your memory directly.

Minne is free, open source, macOS 14 and later. Download it this week; next Monday's update is then mostly written.

Free, open source, and yours to read. macOS 14 and later.