Staying organized as an IC was pretty easy - for the most part, the things I needed to track and accomplish were on my team’s Jira board. As a manager, it’s a little more complicated. My work is sometimes more abstract, there’s more of it and more kinds of it, and I don’t have a built-in place to track it. Here are some of the tools and methods I use to stay organized and accountable for the work I do!

1:1s

I’ve tried out a few different tools for 1:1s, and have settled on Fellow as my app of choice. It integrates nicely with my calendar to populate meetings and puts recurring meetings into a scrollable stream, which makes it easy to see the history of my 1:1s.

The template I use has gone through a few iterations, but currently I have an Agenda section with talking points; Action Items with to-dos; Praise/Feedback with a bullet list; and Tags with a bullet list. I really like that Fellow will ask if you want to transfer open talking points from the last meeting (or you can set preferences to do this automatically), which makes it easy to keep track of your topics.

Praise/Feedback helps me track when I’m sharing those things in 1:1s, and that info eventually gets transferred to a Trello board (more on that below). For Action Items, Fellow offers a really nice way to track them alongside the meeting stream they’re in, and you can view all open to-dos in a single view.

Tags is just a manual list that I use specific syntax for so it’s searchable later - e.g. “tag-feedback” or “tag-goals”. Tracking tags is something that I’m trying out this quarter to see how often something is coming up, especially in regards to feedback. I wish there was actual tag notation and tracking, but I’ll just leave that as a feature request for the Fellow team (which has great customer service!). I don’t love the setup I have with this - searching for tags returns results in all meeting streams, so it’s a little arduous to figure out how often a tag is occurring for a single person. I have a feeling the effort may not be worth the reward here, in which case I’ll drop this section from my template.

Tracking praise and accomplishments

Last year, I had a conversation with an employee where they gave me some really important feedback - they felt that I gave more constructive feedback and not enough positive feedback or praise. When I thought back about our conversations and interactions over time, I realized they were right.

And I know better! I was an early childhood teacher, and I even talk about negativity bias and the 5:1 feedback ratio in my Marble in Your Nose talk - but I was forgetting to apply that knowledge with this person. So to help me track my habits of feedback, I started a Praise/Feedback Trello board this year!

I’ve got a column for each person on my team, and I’ve divided each column into quarters. There are labels for type of interaction - Praise, Celebration, Accomplishment, and Feedback. For at-a-glance visibility, the first three labels are green and Feedback is orange, so it’s easy to track if I’ve got a bunch of orange cards piling up. It might indicate that I’m forgetting to share positive things, or it might mean that there’s a pattern of constructive feedback happening that I need to dig into.

I also track communication method - 1:1, Slack, DM, Email, and Meetings. Tracking this helps me pay attention to how I’m supporting and advocating for people. When they do something visible that deserves praise, I like to make sure I’m visibly supporting and appreciating their work - things like jumping in to help someone troubleshoot an issue, being part of an incident resolution, sharing their progress on a larger initiative.

This also helps prompt me to ask about wins and things they’re feeling good about in our 1:1s if I see that it’s been a little while since I added a green card. Some people aren’t as good at thinking about or sharing their wins proactively, which means I need to make sure I’m asking them to share.

To-do list

I have an ongoing Trello board where I track my work and tasks. I have 1:1 action items, work and initiatives for the QE department, work that I do as a member of our Agile Leadership Team, my own goals for growth and learning - it’s a lot to keep organized!

Efficient prioritization was a really important feature for me, so I created Now, Soon, and Someday columns. Now is things that need to be immediately on my radar; Soon is things that I’ll want to focus on, well, soon; and Someday is a little more of a hodgepodge of things that I want to track but don’t have any sort of timeline or urgency around them - often they’re more ideas than tasks or bits of accountable work.

Tracking WIP is a little harder - I used to have an In Progress column where I’d move Now items when I was actively doing work towards it, but I didn’t have a good place for the In Progress column and I kept losing track of things that were there because they weren’t at the front of my attention in the Now column. I’ve recently switched to an In Progress label instead, and so far it’s working a little better.

I also have Completed columns for each quarter so I can track the timeline of my work, and I use an Accomplishments label when I move things over from Now to the various Completed columns. (This is your reminder to track your impact and accomplishments over time, people! Get your brag book going! Don’t make yourself remember 12 months of work at review time!)

Planning

My calendar has a recurring EoD Wrap-Up block at 4pm. This is the time of day where I transfer 1:1 action items to my Trello board, prioritize the Now column, set agendas for tomorrow’s 1:1s, and prep for tomorrow’s meetings. Carving out this time has been such a great way to help me stay organized! I don’t always have time to do these things during the day, and consistently setting aside this block of time means I’m not stressing about trying to cram it in.

Calendar

I color-code my calendar so I can see how I’m spending my time throughout the week. I have a different color for manager-related meetings, meetings with my team or related to my team (like their backlog refinement sessions or sprint demos), QE department meetings, Agile Leadership Team meetings, and my personal meetings.

In addition to color-coding the individual events, I also make a new calendar for each category and match it to the color coding. I don’t actually make events under these calendars, but it means they show up in my sidebar so I can reference all of the color categories. I think my method is probably a little weird, but I have a bad memory sometimes so it helps me remember what the colors mean!

What methods or tools do you use to stay organized as a manager? I’d love to hear what’s worked for you!