Principles: Life and Work

by Ray Dalio

For years, I have asked each person who reports to me to take about ten to fifteen minutes to write a brief email of what they did that day, the issues pertaining to them, and their reflections. By reading these updates and triangulating them (in other words, seeing different people’s takes on what they are doing), I can gauge how they are working together, what their moods are, and which threads I should pull. Over the last few years, I’ve developed this into a software application that pulls these updates into a dashboard, which makes them much easier to track, record metrics, and respond to than dealing with dozens of separate email threads. It also allows people to easily provide helpful data—like their morale, how heavy their workload is, issues they want to escalate—on a daily basis. I and those I work with find this simple tool invaluable in helping us stay in sync. Also, at the company level, it provides valuable information for taking the daily pulse of what’s going on (morale, workloads, specific issues, who is doing what, etc.).

Fascinating. Many people would object to overhead of this, but I'd love to learn more.