Writing with purpose

How a weekly email practice brought mindfulness, release, gratitude, confidence, and much more.

When I was part of the Next Billion Users team at Google, I had a weekly ritual (well, almost weekly). I would carve out two hours of my Friday morning for reflection. I would spend the time compiling an end of the week email entitled “What a week.” Every email started with “What a week it’s been…” and whatever came to mind after I made that statement is what I would write. Rarely was there any preparation, any premeditated thoughts. This was a true brain dump. Sometimes I would write something and have to convince myself to keep it in the email just to be true to what was in my head and in my heart. Reflecting back on the practice, I guess it had elements of mindful journaling. According to the author, “Writing mindfully can loosen the grip of sticky emotions by bringing them out of the dark. With just a pen and paper, or an app, we can create the habit of being there for ourselves.” Let’s reflect a bit deeper. I think there was more to it than that.

Personal benefits

Meaningful closure to the week

I wanted to empty out my head and my heart so that I could embrace the weekend (and my family) with open arms and my full attention. The thing about building products is — it doesn’t stop. It never stops. The software development cycle, as it’s taught to us, necessarily has iteration loops. So when do you find some quiet time? How do you exit for a bit to breathe? Burnout was all too real and I needed some way to pause. This mindful practice helped me release the tension of the week and consciously step away from work. By adding in a section of thoughts under the header, “Coming up next week…,” I necessarily pushed those things out to the future and reminded myself that it’ll happen then — doesn’t need my attention now.

Happiness through gratitude

I just went back and amended the subtitle to say “Personal benefits” with an ‘s’ because I realized there’s more.

One key aspect of my composition was calling out others’ accomplishments and giving credit to others. If I think about my own psychology, a little bit of recognition (I wrote praise first, and then embarrassed to admit that, I replaced it with ‘recognition’) and gratitude goes a long way. But, why’s this under the “Personal benefits” header? Because taking that time to show gratitude, unknowingly, made me happier. Research shows that giving thanks can make you happier. Who knew? I certainly didn’t. I mean, now that I think about it — it kinda makes sense. That email was a vehicle for my happiness in ways that I didn’t really understand.

Struggling with consistency

What a week encouraged me to be consistent. By making an implicit promise to my team about the cadence of the email, I was committing to doing something regularly. I’ve always struggled with consistency. In fact, I can probably say that it’s been one of my biggest struggles. I’ve never been good at keeping promises to myself. Part of me would like to believe that it’s because I enjoy variety — part of me knows that’s an excuse. But keeping promises to others? That’s something that I’m good at. And so I made a promise to my team that I’d show up and I did.

Finding confidence in my voice

In my writing, I found confidence in my voice. I wrote like I spoke — from the heart — and people heard me. I didn’t need to be someone I wasn’t. I didn’t need to write in a way that wasn’t my own. I could let the dad jokes fly, no judgement. We talked a lot about “bringing our whole selves to work.” This was me doing it in writing.

Professional benefits

There’s always multiple ways to see benefit. In this case, there was tangible professional benefit as well. It’s professional so you know I gotta use bullets to list this out (I’m laughing at my own joke):

• Transparency to my team: Every week, the teams I led knew exactly what was going through my brain. Excitement, consternation, confusion, pride — everything laid out there for all to see, no filter. I had a section about meetings I attended that were worth talking about and never refrained from talking about meetings that may have, otherwise, felt TOP SECRET. We were all working towards the same mission and if that meeting was critical for us to accomplish the mission, why not talk about it? Of course I left the sensitive details out — but, at the very least, I could share what happened and why it was important to me. I feel like What a week connected me to my team and gave them the insight they needed to make our conversations richer. I’d get replies thanking me, asking me for more detail, or asking to lend a hand. These were seeds that blossomed into hallway conversations and breakfast chats that I adored. Sigh. What a beautiful time we had. Man, writing this is heavy. It feels good to appreciate.

• Bite-sized motivation through recognition: Taking the time to thank others and to recognize the impact they had on the team and the products was — I don’t know — refreshing? It felt so good to call out the hard work, to give people the limelight. The race we were running was more than a marathon (what’s a long marathon called?) — and these small bits of gratitude, I hoped, may have been the cups of water waiting around the corner to give people a small boost to keep running. Sure, we could have waited for the quarterly team meeting to give our shout outs — but why not capture the moment sooner? Use the quarterly for something even more lavish (maybe I’ll write more about our values awards some other time). Recognize the milestones and don’t focus on the goal post — the truth is we may never reach the goal. We were always primed for failure. It was the journey that was important. How we conducted ourselves along the way, what we learned, how we grew as individuals and as a team — all that was so important to recognize, to celebrate.

Come on, there’s gotta be a third bullet. They always come in threes. Two feels like an incomplete list. Yup, there it is.

• Indirectly managing up: Ok, so I’m cheating a bit here (because it’s transparency in a different direction) but What a week was also a fantastic way to manage up and communicate to the world outside of our team. Add people who you want to passively keep updated on your org to a mailing list and sure enough something would catch their eye. I made plenty use of giphy.com to give my emails some flavor and, more importantly, to make them scannable. Similar to how my team benefited by knowing what was on my mind, execs and leaders from around the company that made it onto the list or who were forwarded the emails got an unrestricted, all-access pass to my brain and how I was seeing things. In this way, I may have 1) soft-launched some hard conversations I wanted to have with them, 2) advocated for something that I wanted to see happen for our team, and/or 3) given them a heads up about something amazing happening on the team.

I just thought of a fourth — don’t kill me.

• Modeling “bringing your whole self to work”: I was modeling for the team that they could be themselves, and be proud of it. Here I was, a senior leader on the team, using ridiculous animated GIFs, telling bad jokes, and speaking in an authentically me voice. This wasn’t your standard well-designed, reviewed-to-death, templated email. It was raw, flawed, and real.

Asif — this could have been any newsletter. All newsletters have the benefits that you’re claiming What a week had for you and your team. Hmm. Really? Do they? I, honestly, can’t stand newsletters. In fact, I never referred to my email as a newsletter. It was a weekly email. Maybe something subconscious there. When you’re forced to write something and it doesn’t come from the heart, it’s not going to be read. It’s not going to be fun to write. It’s eventually going to become a chore. That’s not cool. It’s also not cool to put more on others’ plates by attempting to “crowdsource” content. It ends up being a hodgepodge (that’ the first time I’ve ever written that word) of all things and doesn’t mean anything. What set my email apart was its intention. I intended for my writing to do all the things above and I loved every minute. I enjoyed writing those emails. I dare say people enjoyed reading them.

So, this all brings me back to today. I have enjoyed writing this post. As you’ve seen, I haven’t held back my inner voice. It’s here and unabashedly on display for all to read. I’m excited to reclaim a space where I can dump my brain, share a bit about what I’m thinking about, AND show gratitude. I’ve missed this space. I’ve missed all of you. Looking forward to reconnecting.

PS - Here’s some gratitude to close out. Thank you Aysha Siddique for reminding me of how important What a week was to me and Neha Malhotra, Nibha Jain, and Tejas Peesapati for encouraging me to write again. Thank you M. Owais Khan for reminding me about the importance of gratitude. Thank YOU for reading.