Recently I came across an article that talked about why we should keep a Brag Document. I have task lists in various places, and checklists in even more. I also need to report progress to everyone. At the end of the day (let alone at the end of the week, month, or quarter) I can barely remember what I’ve done. Often my days are a blur of activity, and sometimes it’s just too much effort to try to relive it.
When I saw the article on the Brag Doc, I saw it as an opportunity to keep a log of what I’m doing. I’m planning to just drop stuff in as I work on it. I will attempt to include any task, no matter how small I think it is - if it amounted to more than 2 minutes and someone else (including future me) can benefit from knowing about it, I’m gonna stick it in the brag doc.
This thing is going to get ridiculously long, so I’ve decided to keep a Brag Doc of the current year with 3 live sections:
These sections are actually named excerpt sections that can be included in other Confluence Pages (such as my Management Weekly Report).
As work is completed, I’ll move it into the archive section of the document which is further broken down into months. At the end of the year, the archive will go into a new child page under the parent Brag Doc page. The parent Brag doc page will have links to all the previous years.
In this way, I’m logging my work for my own sanity, as well as simultaneously reporting it to whoever is interested. I’m also thinking I may take notes, and link to other places from the current year brag doc. If I keep this as a curated list of links and projects it’ll be more likely that I go to it to begin and end work.