Sharing achievements cross-country

Posted by: Nick Hodgson, Student, Massey University, New Zealand


We welcome Nick Hodgson: creative Google Docs user, and member of the AIESEC support team at Massey University.

My name is Nick Hodgson and I use Google Docs as a part of AIESEC, a student-run non-profit that develops leadership skills by running projects in which students and businesses from around the world collaborate.

Both my executive team here in Palmerston North, New Zealand, and our national leadership team (based all over the country) use Google Docs to update on our progress each week. Our team has approximately 20 members across the country whom we share the updates with, as well as the contact list for our Local Chapters.

We each update three categories in a shared document weekly: Achieved, Not Achieved, Priorities (goals set that week that are for the next week).

Here's how we create our updates:

1. We create a separate document for each member of the team.
2. Each document is shared with all other members.
   
3. At the top of each document, we enter the week-ending date, along with the categories Achieved, Not Achieved, and Priorities.
4. We updated our progress in these three categories throughout the week.
5. At the end of the week, we each just add a horizontal line (page separator) to the top of the document and start over, again entering the week-ending date, and the three categories.
   
6. Repeat, repeat and repeat :)

Here's a sample of a recent week to see how simple and easy it really is.

As you see, it may not be fancy, but it sure is functional. Our entire National Leadership team can easily view what is happening around the country, with everything all in one place. Doing it this way makes it very easy to do quarterly summaries of activity. I know at the end of my term I'm going to find this a lot easier to look at my performance over the year.