For The Love Of God, Stop Making Status Updates So Hard

If you're spending more than 5 minutes filling out a status update form, you're engaging in busywork

I’ve wasted over a month of my life filling out status updates, by total hours.

I’ve been on projects where the status slide update on Friday became an hours-long back-and-forth every single week.

You probably have too.

I hate these things

It’s easy to understand how Empire State Building was completed in 1 year, 45 days but we’re over a year from a California landslide and the highway is still entirely blocked.

Photo by Lo Sarno on Unsplash

Projects stall when too much overhead is imposed.

Why Do So Many Projects Have PPT Status Updates?

• Managers like to feel in control of projects

  • An entire school of thought in American business believes that ‘generalist’ managers can lead projects through the right incentives and pressures.

  • I’ve been part of projects where the ‘project manager’ didn’t actually know what the product did—they’re just expected to report progress along the way.

• Death by Powerpoint culture

  • Powerpoints are the handshake of 2025 commerce. It’s a thoughtless default action. Powerpoint is very seldomly the right choice for a business presentation, but its the default anyway.

  • Pretty wins over functional if you’re not concerned about the project actually getting to completion

• False appeal of ‘rolling up’ metrics

  • Modern managers like to avoid judgement calls. RAG¹ slides give a false feeling of precision. Unless there’s a clear, measurable, agreed-upon metric for each category, its all a judgement call.

  • Many status update slides ‘roll-up’² sub statuses for higher-level updates.

Why PPT Updates Are Wastes & a Caveat)

Caveat First: The INFORMATION that is generally put into a status update slide can be useful—its the enforced form of the information I have the most beef with.

PPT updates are a waste because they force updates into a specific form—a form that’s misaligned with linear thinking.

If there’s an issue, a 2 bullet point summary won’t explain it.

You’d probably have to ask the owner directly; meaning that the status update didn’t serve it’s purpose at all—you had to reach out anyway.

PPT slides also suck because they force unneeded decisions about useless changes.

For example:

• How long does it take you to decide on a shades of color?

• How quickly do you decide between red or yellow status?

  • If its on the edge, you’ll have to explain it anyway—could a written 1 paragraph description be a better way to convey information anyway?

• How long do you spend messing with font sizes to get your text in the right box?

Do any of those decisions—which take mental energy—actually get you closer to your goal?

What To Do Instead: Match Your Solution To Your Problem

Never add more degrees of freedom than necessary to complete the task

—Rule of Robotics Engineering

The video below shows³ a humanoid robot harvesting grain with a saw.

Its a cool throwback to humans harvesting wheat by hand, but think through the real life implications:

• How does it transport the cut wheat for processing? Does it carry it?

• Does it need specialty tools to maintain?

Why don’t you see any interest from real agriculture companies in humanoid robots like this?

Are they just stuck in their ways?

or is there a better, simpler solution already?

Combine harvesters are a modern miracle. They’ve solved so much with harvest, transport, and processing that we forget that they’re hard problems.

Combine harvesters are built to solve a real problem: They’re no more complicated than needed⁴ to be useful.

Use Old Technology: Writing and Linear Thinking

Writing and linear thinking are two of the most powerful technologies that build the modern world. They provide a lot of structure and are no more complicated than needed for asynchronous communication.

Don’t throw them away because they’re free.

Writing

When a brief word document can suffice, don’t add more overhead.

The written word has more constraints⁵ than PowerPoint, so you make fewer choices—and move faster. I’ve spent less time writing this article than choosing the pictures that went into it.

Linear Thinking

Human brains process linear narratives far better than disparate facts (or even pictures!).

Use that design to your advantage! Use narrative when describing how a problem appeared, what your plan is, and what some potential solutions are.

Conclusion

Pick your constraints and status update form intentionally.

Make it so that every decision an updater makes pushes the update further towards completion.

Writing is a great tool for this because the natural constraints mean that each additional word chosen is an opportunity for clarity.

Powerpoint slides have seemingly infinite choices that never help.

Use the minimum overhead to get your point across—don’t force your teams to update a fancy slide every week.

1. Red, Amber, Green (from our friends across the pond)

2. For example, if you were opening a canned water company, you might have marketing and manufacturing components. If all manufacturing components were ‘green’, then the overall ‘manufacturing’ status would be green.

If marketing were all green and one yellow, the overall status would be yellow.

It’s generally the floor function of the sub-categories

3. shows a very bad render

4. John Deere’s fight against right to repair notwithstanding

5. The written word has a lot of implicit constraints—linear structure, static form, visual only—but more constraints mean you’re making fewer choices!