What to Do in Your First Week at a New Job

Your first week at a new job sets the pattern for everything after it. Not because you need to impress anyone with output (you don't), but because the habits, relationships, and questions you start with compound. Here is what to actually do, day by day, to land well.

Set the right mindset before day one

The first week is for learning, not performing. You will not deliver anything meaningful, and nobody sensible expects you to. Your job is to absorb context, meet people, and figure out how the place actually works under the surface of how it says it works.

Resist the urge to prove yourself by volunteering for things in week one. The people who do this usually end up overcommitted before they understand what they signed up for. Observe first. Commit later.

Day one: arrive, set up, listen

Day one is mostly admin and introductions. Don't fight it. Get the boring stuff out of the way so you have headspace for the harder days ahead.

• Get your accounts working. Email, calendar, Slack or Teams, the project tool, the shared drive. If something is broken, raise it today, not Thursday.
• Read the org chart. Even a rough one. Know who your manager's manager is, and which teams sit next to yours.
• Save key documents. Onboarding deck, employee handbook, any team wiki. You will reread these in week two.
• Write down every name you hear. You will not remember them otherwise.
• Have lunch with someone. Even briefly. The fastest way to feel less new is to share a meal.

Days two and three: meet your manager properly

Your manager is the single most important relationship in your first year. Do not let your first real conversation with them be in week three. Get a proper one-to-one in the diary by day three.

The conversation you want is not "what should I do?" It is closer to a calibration. Ask:

• What does success look like in this role at 30, 60, and 90 days?
• What are the two or three things you most want me to focus on first?
• How do you prefer to communicate? Slack, email, scheduled calls?
• What is the team currently struggling with that I should know about?
• Who should I make sure to meet in the first month?

Write the answers down. You will refer to them throughout the year.

Schedule introductory meetings with your team

Book 20 to 30 minute introductory calls with everyone on your immediate team, plus the key people in adjacent teams your role touches. Don't wait for someone to schedule them for you.

Keep these meetings simple. The format that works:

1. Two minutes on your background. Brief, not a CV recital.
2. Ask what they do, who they work with, and what they're working on right now.
3. Ask: "What do you wish someone had told you in your first month here?"
4. Ask: "Who else should I make sure to talk to?"

Read everything the previous person left behind

If you are replacing someone, there is almost certainly a handover document somewhere. Find it. Read it twice. Then read the documents it links to.

If there isn't one, ask your manager what exists. There is usually something: an old project tracker, a shared folder, a Notion page that nobody updated for six months. Anything is better than nothing.

Things worth your time in week one:

• The handover document, if one exists
• The team's active project list and any recent retros
• The last three months of the team's shared channel
• Recordings of recent all-hands or team meetings
• Any "how we work" or onboarding documents

Ask the dumb questions now

There is a short window in your first two weeks where you can ask anything. After that, it gets harder. You become someone who is "supposed to know" and the questions get more awkward to raise.

Use the window. Ask what acronyms mean. Ask why a process exists. Ask who owns what. Nobody will judge you for this in week one. They might in week six.

Set the working pattern you actually want

Your first week sets your defaults. If you reply to Slack at 11pm on Tuesday, you have just told everyone that's when you reply to Slack. If you take a proper lunch break on day three, you've told them that's your pattern.

Pick the version of you that you want to be at this job and start there. It is much easier to start with the right boundaries than to claw them back later.

End the week with a written reflection

On Friday afternoon, spend 20 minutes writing down what you learned. Not for anyone else. For you.

Three short lists:

• What I now understand that I didn't on Monday
• What still confuses me and who I need to ask
• Who I should talk to next week that I haven't met yet

Do this every Friday for your first month. By week four you will have a clearer map of the place than most people who've been there a year.

If there is no handover document waiting for you

This is the most common painful surprise of a new job: the person before you left nothing behind. Or they left a one-page outline that answers none of the questions you actually have.

If you ever find yourself on the other side of this (resigning from a role and writing the handover for the next person), do them the favour you wish you'd been done. OneLast.Day reads your Gmail, Drive, and Calendar and builds the handover document from your actual work data, so the next person walks into context rather than a void.