Keeping a brag document got me promoted at work. You should keep one too. 🙌

Let’s start at my typical work day. I work as a Software Developer at a major e-commerce website (Hmm, which one could that be? 🤔)

Like most developers, only a small part of my job is actually writing code, and most of the time is spent on meetings/discussions, and helping junior engineers along with debugging some of the issues they face while setting out fires in production.

While these take up 70% of the time, there’s no way to account for them during the performance discussions. Many of these tasks are ephemeral and I forget them by the next day’s stand up update, let alone a discussion 6 months down. This is a typical day of most software developers, and you most likely is one of them.

Here’s why you need a brag document:

• You often forget the time spent helping other developers and it is your responsibility to bring it up, so your manager realises the time sink that it actually is.
• Your manager has 10 other reportees under him, and is worrying about his own tasks. If you don’t bother bringing things up, he has a lesser reason to.
• You can’t do these, if you don’t remember what you have done.
• You barely remember what was done yesterday while giving today’s standup update.
• Performance discussions are a pain to you because 6 months flew by, you know you had worked hard, but when you look at the bigger picture you don’t see how it could have taken 6 months to accomplish that.
• You had fixed a bug that was pretty hard to find and debug, but no one knows that — not even you.
• You don’t remember the meetings you were part of, and the discussions and contributions that never saw the light of day because of other priorities.
• You have an infinite todo list that keeps growing with the list of tasks to be done, and you keep trying a new todo list manager that will probably help with this.

To fix these, last year I started writing down items in a text editor, but during the performance discussions it became impossible to synthesise information out of it. It took an entire day for me to segregate and collate information out of it. That’s when I thought it should be fairly simple to implement a small utility for it.

Here’s what it should do for a developer

• Should be minimal and gets out of the way when you don’t need it
• Should open as a new tab in Chrome to enter what was done in the last few hours
• Should be able to tag projects (prefix with $) and people (prefix with @) for future filters
• Should show the items completed in the last 24 hours to give impressive standup updates
• Takes in a quick todo, but expires in 24 hours so there’s urgency to complete it and there’s no infinite list of them.
• Should not have ugly buttons that require mouse, but should be command based
• Should allow for weekly, monthly and bi-annual reflections (Coming soon)
• All the data should be exportable as JSON so that programmers can write a script that can analyse it to their use

Keeping these in mind, I built done.today. It aims to keep track of the work items that you have done, but also minimal enough to not get into your way when you don’t need it. It has enough features to be useful, but not cluttered. Input is not buttons and checkboxes, but an easy command based omnibox.

Do give it a shot, and let me know your thoughts on it. I hope you find it as useful as I did (I am now an SDE-3 at the e-commerce company, thanks keeping the list of tasks completed and presenting them well)

https://usedone.today

Your new tab