The one thing you needed to do last week

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

At the time of writing, Elon Musk was still the face of the Department of Government Efficiency, which was neither a cabinet-level department, nor demonstrably efficient. It’s not even clear if Musk legally leads it.

But hey ho. Such is life in the wild world of the 2025 White House.

Here’s one thing that is true: last weekend, Musk arranged for US government workers to receive an email with the subject line, “What did you do last week?”

People were asked to send back five bullet points listing their accomplishments by midnight on Monday. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” Musk posted on Saturday.

Even by Trumpian standards, this unleashed a wave of baffling confusion. Trump praised the “genius” of the email. Some agencies ordered employees to comply with it. Others told staff to sit tight while others said it should be ignored. The New York Times reported that people at the CIA were “quietly instructed not to respond to Musk’s email in the hopes that the problem would go away”.

I watched all this unfold from what seemed a safe distance, until I spoke to a US academic whose daughter, a single mother who had just been diagnosed with breast cancer, works at a federal agency and received the email. “If she loses her job she loses her health insurance,” he said, adding drily, “It’s been a really good week.”

It isn’t easy to know what Musk’s ultimate aim is. On Wednesday, he described the emails as a “pulse check” and claimed government payrolls included dead people. But let’s assume that, in order to cut waste and boost productivity, he wants a better understanding of what workers are actually doing. Bosses across the corporate world want the same thing, as do many employees, especially those in offices whose work is often invisible.

When I first heard about Musk’s edict, I realised quite a bit of what might go into my five bullet points was not very visible. The three video interviews with nuclear industry experts for an FT film. The four interviews for a magazine feature. The webinar to promote an upcoming FT conference. The other webinar to help judge media awards. The meeting with a politician.

Everyone around me does much the same thing, or more. Sometimes their time-starved managers know about it. Very often they do not, which is why an entire software industry emerged years ago selling tools to help managers monitor what their staff are doing in real time.

These tools are widespread. Even government agencies use them. But they are far from perfect. They don’t encourage trust between bosses and the bossed. They cannot capture the myriad tasks people do each day that make a business hum. Nor can they always tell how well a job has been done.  

The Muskian idea of asking people to list their five biggest accomplishments is also imperfect. 

Even if you don’t work for an organisation in the sights of a volatile billionaire, you might well over-egg what you do each week. 

And again, unless your job involves achieving measurable targets in, say, sales, production or shipping, it would be hard to know exactly how well your bullet-pointed tasks had been executed.

I like to think my interviewing and webinaring the other week were productive but I might struggle to prove that. 

I suspect there is a better way. There is another tech billionaire with a fondness for black leather jackets who encourages staff to write notes about five big things at work: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.

The boss of the semiconductor giant has for years been urging staff to jot down what they are working on or noticing in these brief notes, which are known as T5Ts or Top Five Things.

He reads enough of them to gain critical insights into what is happening inside his business and whether his priorities are being followed, according to Tae Kim, author of the recent book, The Nvidia Way.

I like the sound of Huang’s management style. Alas for the thousands of US government workers, they are stuck with a leader driven by demons even he can only guess at. “What matters to me is winning, and not in a small way. God knows why,” Musk once wrote in an email reported by his latest biographer, Walter Isaacson. “It’s probably rooted in some very disturbing psychoanalytical black hole or neural short circuit.”