Narrate Your Work
The phrase shows up in 2001 on Dave Winer’s blog:
I like working with developers who communicate. Ask any of them. I stress this all the time. “Narrate your work,” says Dave. Our RFC process generates excellent writing. Perhaps we have different values than other devteams. People wonder how we get so much done with so few people. Perhaps this is it.
Jon Udell echoed the sentiment a few years later (2009):
Since then I’ve spoken a few times about the idea that by narrating our work, we can perhaps restore some of what was lost when factories and then offices made work opaque and not easily observable. Software developers are in the vanguard of this reintegration, because our work processes… are fully mediated by digital networks. But it can happen in other lines of work too, and I’m sure it will.
An important part of early Google engineering culture was the notion of snippets. Snippets were short summaries of work and achievements from the last week, and sometimes, plans for the next. Most engineers would write snippets for their week every Friday afternoon.
Importantly, snippets were visible to the entire company. Anyone could look up anyone else’s snippets and hence read an ongoing log of their work, their challenges and their plans.
They ranged in length and format. Most wrote snippets that were a quick list of bullets. Often there would be links to documents, bugs or code. But there were a few outliers who used snippets as a creative outlet, writing mini-essays or sometimes long reflections in their snippets. I greatly enjoyed these.
Narrating your work is different from making your work public. It is the meta-narrative. It is talking about how you did the work, about the thought process behind it, about what informed the work. It is about all the missteps and the struggle and the paths that did not work out. It is not a clean story. It is not a synthesized result. It is a lab notebook, not a published paper.
Ironically, when you narrate your work, there usually isn’t a narrative. Every individual update seems to be a random point in the cloud. Only when you look back on a few months or years of you narrating your work do you begin to see all the threads. All those points start appearing as a coherent picture when you zoom out.
Narration serves both the writer and the reader. To the writer it provides a respite, and recognition of work accomplished, lessons learned and things built, in an otherwise breakneck work environment. To the reader it provides commiseration, comfort in the knowledge that there are others sharing similar burdens and pushing through comparable struggles. Above all—the reader gets to learn from those further along the path of mastery.
Keep narrating.