Get your work recognized: write a brag document (2019)

The author makes several great points about why it's beneficial to document your accomplishments. I've been following a similar approach for the last few years using Sublime and the PlainTasks[0] plugin to break apart projects and tasks into individual items and mark them with a timestamp when finished. I'll move the completed tasks into a new quarterly archive section to keep things clean every so often, and those sections end up providing most if not all of the information I need for self-evaluations and manager discussions while entirely amortized over the course of the year.

Sure you could do something similar with Jira though I personally find Sublime to be far less overwhelming for the task, though I will usually pair the larger entries with a jira ID so there's a link back to that additional context.

0 - https://github.com/aziz/PlainTasks

I do my brag items within a big Notion page that has all my daily Slack-ups (yesterday + today snapshot). I use the ‘callout’ block type with an orange background and a :party: emoji so they stand out.

This has worked well enough, and I particularly like that the brag items are situated amongst my daily Slack-ups. quickly scrolling up and checking the density of brags gives me a sense of how I’m doing.

I’ve also started wording them better to align with Situation-Task-Action-Result form, which makes them more effective come review time.

Overall this habit/chore is one of the things I’m pretty glad that I just do.

On a similar note, I like to keep a work journal at my personal computer that I update every few months with what I've been doing. It helps with the interview preparation, as one of the most common questions is "what did you do at company X?"