Why I Started Doing Sunday Resets
Every Sunday I sit down with a coffee and ask two questions:
- What did I actually ship this week?
- What slowed me down — and how do I avoid it next week?
Running two products at once (FillTheTimesheet and PromptShip), I learned the hard way that without a weekly reset, the urgent quietly eats the important. Here are 5 lessons from this week.
1. Time data beats time estimates
I caught myself estimating "this'll take an hour" three times this week for tasks that took four. Tracking actual time on each task — not at the end of the day, but the moment I switched contexts — closed the gap fast. My estimates got 60% more accurate inside two weeks.
The takeaway isn't "track every minute." It's: start tracking the moment your gut estimate feels wrong.
2. Your team's best AI prompt is in someone's Slack DMs
This week I helped a marketing team audit their AI workflows. They had ~40 prompts they used regularly. Twenty of them lived in one person's Notion. Fifteen lived in scattered Slack DMs. Five lived only in someone's head.
When the prompt author was on vacation, the team stalled.
A shared prompt library isn't a "nice to have" — it's the difference between AI being a team tool and AI being one person's productivity hack.
3. Ship before you're ready, write post-mortems when you're calm
Friday's deploy had a bug. Saturday morning I almost wrote a frustrated post-mortem. I waited 24 hours. Today's version is half the length and twice as useful.
Frustration writes long. Calm writes useful.
4. Async-first only works if writing is async-good
Async culture fails when written updates require five clarification threads. Three things that helped this week:
- Lead with the decision, not the context
- One question per message
- "What I need from you" goes at the top, not buried
5. The weekly recap is the cheapest planning tool you have
I used to run quarterly planning, monthly OKRs, and weekly priorities. The weekly recap — done in 20 minutes on Sunday — moves the needle more than all of them combined.
How These Show Up in My Week
For time visibility, I use FillTheTimesheet — it auto-categorizes blocks so I'm not babysitting a stopwatch.
For prompt knowledge, I use PromptShip for our shared library. The "one-click copy into ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini" was the small detail that finally got the non-engineers on the team to actually contribute.
Both started as scratched itches. They keep getting better because every Sunday reset surfaces one more thing to fix.
Your Turn
What's one thing you'd do differently last week if you could rewind it? Drop it in the comments — I read every one.
Written by The Speed Engineer. More long-form on Medium.
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