---
title: The status update writes itself
description: The hard part of a status update is recall, not writing. Type "where does the project stand?" in a blank doc, tap one key, and Minne fills in the dates and decisions it saw land.
---


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](https://docs.minne.sh/guides/instructions).

## 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](https://docs.minne.sh/guides/minne-key).

The same mechanism answers [email](/email-replies) — 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](https://github.com/mandgie/minne/releases/latest/download/Minne.dmg)
this week; next Monday's update is then mostly written.