Brag Document
Do you remember what you did this week? May be. How about last week, well… if you have a good memory you might remember, but for most you might remember just important things but not all. Two weeks back? Three weeks back? I doubt most of us remember anything beyond 3–4 weeks back.
After a year of working, you face your appraisal, how much do you remember of what you did? You know you did a lot, sometimes your boss also knows it, but can you list 25 most important things you contributed to or most important 10 times you helped others to get their work done, during past year?
You might have a bad conversation with your boss or a peer and if asked what did you do to the company during last year, can you quickly list 20 items and ask him or her whether you should go till 100?
This is where Brag Document comes in to help you. Brag document is a text file or a word document or even a hand written document of all important things you have done. You need to update that daily or in worst case every other day. Let me give you same examples.
2024–10–1: Went very late 10.30pm as I was helping Sohail to get DB Connection issue sorted out
2014–10–2: Did a speech at Toastmasters
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2014–10–2: Went with Client team to meet HSBC to demonstrate our Trading Solution
2014–10–3: Fixed the memory leak issue in Trade Router which was crashing at every now and then during last 6 months
Like above, it can be something you did to fix an issue, helping another employee or going beyond your usual job description and helping the organisation or anything you feel added value.
When you goto your appraisal you will have so many things to talk about your contributions to the company in many aspects. Your boss will be amazed to hear you and will help him to justify you a promotion to HR team.
Brag Document not only help you to face appraisal or to answer anybody challenges you, but also for you to evaluate yourself whether you are doing enough or not and achieving your objectives. If you find daily, there is nothing for you to write on Brag Document, then you need to feel that you are not doing enough or you need to break the rhythm and do something important.
When you start writing your Brag Document you will find way to categorise items and tag them, so that you can quickly find certain type of items. Eg. when you helped other team members?
If you are given a set of Objectives by your boss, then in Brag Document you can mention each work you did to achieve these Objectives. May be HR team gave you a PDP (Personal Development Plan), you can use Brag Document to list everything you did to improve daily basis. When a progress review meeting is called, your seniors and HR team will be surprised to see how much you have done.
Start maintaining a Brag Document and see the difference it can make to your career.
Note: The initial idea of Brag Document came from the Julia Even’s blog https://jvns.ca/blog/brag-documents/
