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Daily Ops Broadcast (standing tactic)

Standing, daily, every team member. Open the workday in #operations with what you plan to accomplish today — after spending 10–15 minutes actually thinking about it. Then attack the day. Throughout, update the same broadcast as work lands.

Owner: every team member · Cadence: daily, every workday · Status: 🌱 formalizing the practice that's already happening

What this is​

This tactic operationalizes the Plan in Public operating principle (#9). Erik has been a believer for years; the practice is already in place for Stormy, Matt Tan, Erik himself, and others. This page just makes it the default.

The flow:

  1. First 10–15 minutes of the workday: think. Don't open Slack. Don't open Jira. Open a piece of paper or a blank note. What actually needs to happen today? What's blocking what? What's the most important thing? What are the two-or-three things that, if done, make today a good day?
  2. Post the broadcast in #operations. Date, projects, bulleted concrete items.
  3. Attack the day. This is the bulk of it.
  4. Update the broadcast as you go. Mark items shipped. Add things that emerged. Flag blockers.

The format​

Loose but consistent. Something like:

[Date]

[Project / surface 1]
- Concrete thing #1
- Concrete thing #2
- Concrete thing #3

[Project / surface 2]
- ...

Through the day, update with:

  • ✅ for shipped
  • 🚧 for in flight
  • ⏸️ for paused / blocked (with the blocker named)
  • New items as they emerge (don't hide late additions; the broadcast is a living plan, not a contract)

What good looks like — real examples​

Stormy Emery, 5/17:

5/17
Cont. with FEQ related stuff
- Setup staging HMAC secret as well as set the FeqLeadSlackWebhookUrl admin settings
- see where we are at with merging the equities dashboard work
  (feat(feq): Equities Dashboard — internal control room for Semi-Infra rollout
   (#3999/#4006/#4007 scaffold))
  merged
- Help out with PR reviews and anything else that needs it

Matt Tan, 5/18:

5/18
Twinspires
- STE Validations
- Internal QA
- QAA

Polaris
- Investigate Failed tests — 🔴 Data Subscriptions: 0/1

What makes these good:

  • Project-grouped — the reader knows which surface each item belongs to
  • Concrete — specific tasks, not “I'll work on Polaris”
  • Honest about scope — “see where we are at with merging” is a real thing one can do; “ship the dashboard” would be vague
  • Updated in place — Stormy added “merged” inline once that item landed

Anti-patterns​

  • ❌ Posting at end of day what you did. Defeats the entire purpose. The accountability is in the forecast, not the retrospective.
  • ❌ Skipping the 10–15 minute thinking pause. Broadcast becomes performative; ten minutes later you forget what you said and drift.
  • ❌ Generic items like “PRs and meetings” or “work on bugs.” That's not a plan. If you can't name three concrete items, you haven't thought.
  • ❌ Posting only when you accomplish something. That's a brag, not a broadcast.
  • ❌ Sandbagging. Listing only what you're sure you'll finish. The broadcast should be ambitious enough that some items might slip — and slipping in public is fine; that's the point.
  • ❌ Silent days. If you didn't post, you didn't plan. The team notices.

Why peer accountability beats boss accountability​

Erik's observation from years of running teams: people care more about what their peers think of them than what their boss thinks of them. A retroactive “here's what I did this week” report to a boss is a weak forcing function — nobody's watching closely, the social cost of underperformance is mild, and the boss is usually inferring as much as reading.

Broadcasting your forecast to peers inverts that. The reader is a colleague who knows the shape of the work, will spot if you're sandbagging, and will notice if today's post sounds like yesterday's. That is the social pressure that gets work done.

This is also why the boss shouldn't respond to every broadcast. The audience is the team, not management. Boss check-ins are a different mechanism. Don't mix them.

Where to find / where to post​

Status & next steps​

  1. ✅ Tactic stood up (this page)
  2. ⬜ Pin this page in #operations as the canonical reference
  3. ⬜ Confirm the practice extends to everyone — in the next #operations roll call, name who is doing this and who isn't yet
  4. ⬜ Weekly: pin the strongest broadcasts as exemplars