Workflow
End-of-day reports, collected in Slack
Cedric asks each teammate three questions by DM at 17:30, gathers the answers, and posts one end-of-day summary to the team channel. A template inside.
Benjamin Ben HattarAn end-of-day report is three lines. What you finished, what's stuck, what's first tomorrow. Written every evening, it saves the manager a morning of asking around and catches a blocker a day earlier.
It rarely survives a month. People forget, the doc nobody reads gets skipped, and the manager ends up chasing reports instead of reading them.
This routine moves the asking to Cedric. At 17:30 he sends each person the three questions in a Slack DM. Each reply takes a minute. He posts one summary to the team channel, blockers on top.
- Nobody opens a doc. The questions arrive as a DM, and the answer is a reply.
- The team reads one message, with blockers first, instead of six reports.
- Quiet people get one nudge. After that, the summary goes out without them.
- Keep a log if you want one. Each day's answers can land as rows in a Google Sheet.
Tuesday, 18:30
Six people, one message.
CedricAPP9:14 AM
End of day, 5 of 6 answered. Blocked: Lina is still waiting on legal's review of the Halcyon contract, now two days. Done: the pricing page went live, and Noah closed the import bug. First tomorrow: Lina on onboarding emails, Marco on the Brightline demo. Jonas didn't answer.
Marta Steiner9:15 AM
Two days is too long for Halcyon.
CedricAPP9:16 AM
I can ask Petra in legal for a date tomorrow at 9:00 and post her answer here.
The three questions
Copy these, or change them. Shorter questions get answered more often.
What did you finish today? Finished, not worked on. "Shipped the pricing page" tells the team something. "Worked on the pricing page" doesn't.
What's blocked, and who can unblock it? The most useful line in the report. A name turns a complaint into something the manager can act on in the morning.
What's first tomorrow? One thing. It tells the team what to expect and keeps two people from starting the same job.
Set it up
- 01
Add Cedric to Slack
Install him in your workspace and invite him to the team channel, #team here. You start with 100,000 free credits, about $50 of work, and no card.
- 02
Type the routine once
"Every weekday at 17:30, DM Lina, Noah, Marco, Jonas, Sara and Tom the three end-of-day questions. Nudge once at 18:15. At 18:30, post one summary in #team with blockers first, and list who didn't answer."
He tells you what he understood before he creates anything. Fix the names or the times in the same reply.
- 03
Tell the team
Say in #team that the answers go into a shared summary. A DM with Cedric is otherwise private, so people should know which replies get posted.
- 04
Keep a log, if you want one
"Also add each day's answers to the EOD sheet, one row per person." He appends the rows to Google Sheets on your yes.
Before you rely on it
Skip the quiet days. A summary that says the same thing every evening stops being read. Tell him to post only blockers and anything new, or to stay quiet on Fridays.
The summary reports what people say. If you also want what the tracker says, ask for a standup read from Jira or Linear. The two work side by side.
FAQ
What was finished, what is blocked and who can unblock it, and the first task for tomorrow. Three lines is enough. Longer reports get skipped.
He nudges once at the time you set. If they stay quiet, the summary goes out without them and says who is missing. Nobody gets chased all evening.
Yes. Tell him in the channel, or pause it from the dashboard. Scheduled work stays visible there, and you can change or cancel it.
Yes. The questions are an ordinary Slack DM, so a reply from the Slack app on the way home counts the same as one typed at a desk.
Free to start, no card.