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📝 Tracking Your Work

In my opinion, effectively tracking your work and your progress is an essential first step in developing your career. Doing so regularly will make it much easier to make the case for a promotion or raise when it comes time for your annual review.

Types of Records to Keep​

  • If you don't already have one, start a brag doc immediately. This is a place to keep track of your wins, which is really helpful for things like annual reviews, and is also a really helpful weapon against imposter syndrome.
  • Another great record to start is a developer journal, where you can keep track of things you've done and learned, and which you can use as a reference. (See also daily work journal)
  • You can also track your work in a way that makes it easier to spin up a resume the next time you're on the job hunt.
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My advice is to start tracking your work in the simplest possible way at first:

  • Start with a tool that you are already comfortable with (For example, if you use Slack heavily, you can use a running DM with yourself. If you live in your IDE, you can create a repo of markdown files.).
  • Start by just tracking the things you consider most essential to your job. I might recommend tracking your wins, and then notes on tickets you've worked on. As you build a habit of tracking your work, you'll think of additional things that are important to you, or ways of organizing the information that's more useful to you.

Sharing Your Wins​

On top of tracking your work, you should also be regularly sharing the highlights with your manager.

Some of us have been socialized not to brag about ourselves, which can make it really hard to share your wins. A few tactics that can help with this:

  1. Get practice! I implemented "Wins-days" on Wednesdays in the Slack channel for women in my department, as a recurring time (in a supportive environment) when we were encouraged to brag about ourselves. I've also told managers in the past that I have difficulty hyping myself up, and asked them to help me stay accountable.
  2. Find a buddy (or several). Team up with people that you work with, and hype each others' wins! If you're uncomfortable bragging about yourself, it can feel a lot easier to brag about someone else. Being each other's hype squad is also a great way of strengthening your network
  3. Use metrics when possible. Stating a task you accomplished along with the impact it had is a neutral way of bragging about yourself without having to explicitly say "I'm crushing it!"

This article on promoting yourself has some additional advice on this topic.

Useful Tools​

  • My notetaking app of choice is Obsidian. (Here's an intro to Obsidian if you'd like to learn more.)
  • My task manager of choice is Todoist, which I've been using for the past decade.