TL;DR: Keep an internally public, daily journal of snippets describing the impact of your work, written with the intention of adding them to your performance review.
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After receiving peer feedback that it wasn’t clear what I did as a staff engineer in my director’s organization, I began an experiment: I started keeping a daily, internally public work journal, riffing on Julia Evans’ brag doc technique. The effect was immediate. My manager and several peers were quick to praise and appreciate the transparency, and a couple other folks started their own journals too.
Having kept up the daily practice for a couple of years, I have an even greater appreciation for its usefulness. Here is why.
Knowing I’m going to post something public to my colleagues at the end of every work day motivates me to do work worth posting about! It also serves as a point of reflection, forcing me to consider whether I used my time effectively, sparking conversations with my manager and peers about how to better allocate my time.
Managers are busy dealing with HR and non-technical issues in addition to their technical leadership. Having a report “self-manage” makes their job easier, and my work journal is a big part of that. It also creates artifacts for sharing my impact up the leadership chain with skip-levels and beyond.
Not all impactful work results in a PR or issue, let alone one with my name on it. Pairing, reviewing code, and attending meetings can be just as or even more impactful than shipping PRs and writing issues. My work journal gives me a place to document these activities and describe their impact. For example, I might say:
My work often extends beyond specific projects, the typical nexus of coordination and reporting via issues or standup reports. For example, I might write about a new technology I evaluated for a potential future project. It is also a way to bring my whole self to work: I will occasionally include personal life entries with photos, especially when I am working across teams and don’t feel like sharing those kinds of updates with each group.
While I often share some of the information in my journal elsewhere, such as on Slack (with limited retention) and in standup meetings, those forms are ephemeral. Keeping a record in a permanent and centralized format avoids link rot and eliminates the need to search for information later on.
I started my work journaling practice around the time that we had our first child, and thank goodness I did! These days it’s a lot harder to remember what I did the previous day, week, or before vacation. Writing my accomplishments daily reduces the amount I need to remember to almost nothing. This is especially important when switching managers, as it’s easy for context to be lost on what impact you’ve had. It’s more reliable to handle tracking your impact yourself instead of expecting others to do it.
When it’s time to write my performance self-reviews, I simply read my work journal and copy items into our review format.
Having struggled to separate work from life as a remote worker, I’ve gotten in the habit of an end-of-day shutdown ritual. I finish and post my work journal, then power off my computer for the day. This has helped minimize how much I think about work when I’m with my family.
Keep an internally public, daily journal of snippets describing the impact of your work, written with the intention of adding them to your performance review.
Thanks to Tim, Jon, Matt and Siddharth for helping with this post and to the folks at Boulder Ruby whose discussion after my talk earlier this month inspired it.