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Keep a brag document. Your manager doesn’t remember everything you did.
pm.daily ·
Near review time, a lot of people say the same thing: “Looking back, it feels like I didn’t do much this year.” Usually that’s not true. You just didn’t write it down.
● The brag document
Julia Evans, a developer who writes at jvns.ca, popularized a simple idea: a brag document. It’s your own running record of what you did and the impact it had. She keeps one per year and makes it fairly thorough, five to ten pages, sometimes with graphs or screenshots.
For people who hate bragging, her framing helped me. You’re not making your work sound better than it was. You’re making it sound exactly as good as it was. Even a great manager doesn’t remember everything important you did.
● Small wins vanish first
Results fade with time, and the small ones go first. Automating a tedious task, quietly catching a bug before it shipped, helping a teammate unblock. If you don’t record them, review season leaves you with the two or three things that happened most recently. That’s not a skill problem. It’s a memory problem.
● Keep it light
If you start a brag document as a big formal project, you’ll quit in three days. I just add a line when I finish something: what it was, and what changed. Those lines pile up into the raw material for a résumé, a self-review, or a raise conversation.
Evans calls this one of the most important posts she’s written, because a culture where people track and celebrate their work is quietly powerful. I’ve come to agree.
— Source: Julia Evans, ‘Get your work recognized: write a brag document’
https://jvns.ca/blog/brag-documents/