How to supercharge your engineering career with Brag Journal
And why every leader should adapt it in their teams to improve engineering culture
Have you ever experienced an awkward performance review happening once per year where you had a hard time summarizing your accomplishments during that time and it turned out that your manager wasn’t aware about half of them? Or maybe this is how you conducted some of the performance review as a manager?
It turns out that this is quite a common experience!
Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way. There is one simple way how to turn things around. Just spending 5-10 minutes every week/every two weeks on maintaining a Brag Journal can radically change your performance reviews and get you promoted way faster.
And for managers - adopting this practice is also in your best interest. It will make your performance reviews simpler as well as advocating for promotions during performance calibrations. Not to mention that regular journaling and reflection will make the entire team grow so much faster!
Read this article to learn the best practices behind the Brag Journal and adapt it right away to supercharge your own career or the entire teams you manage!
What is a Brag Journal?
The idea behind Brag Journals is simple - every week or two, spend a couple of minutes to reflect and take a note of your work. With a special emphasis on the achievements as this is an opportunity to brag about it. It doesn’t mean that you need to apply some hard-sell tactics and distorting reality, but since the Impostor Syndrome is so common, the opportunity to focus on specific achievements and taking pride in them is a helpful practice.
If that idea sounds to you like debriefing or writing a journal then you are right, this is exactly what it is. Or you might even consider it an equivalent of personal Agile-like retrospective.
And this is exactly why Brag Journals are so useful. It’s not just a list of accomplishments (the “Brag” part). The second part (“Journal”) is equally important, if not even more, as reflecting on your work has a massive educational value. This is where the learning happens and this is the time to think which aspects to improve and how.
Best Practices For Writing the Brag Journal
Even though the idea sounds simple, the proper execution is essential to fully benefit form it. Here are some hints that will help you get started:
Make it a regular and frequent practice
Ideally, schedule it in the calendar to make it non-negotiable, as if it was a meeting! The best interval would be to write it every week, either on Friday or Monday. Spending 10-15 minutes on journaling should be enough.
Doing it every 2 weeks should also be fine, but anything longer than this is a bad idea - you will remember less things which will make it harder to write and you might miss some important details. Also, you would delay any improvements that could be made if you reflected on them earlier.
Measure your achievements
Not everything you do can be easily measured, but if it’s possible, then add as many measurements as possible!
"Improving performance of reads in API v2 by 87% for p50“ sounds way better than “API performance improvements“. If you can link it to a business impact, for example: increasing revenue, decreasing infrastructure cost, helping in acquisition of some customer, even better! This is the best path to getting pro
Don’t the cut the corners during journaling
Writing about achievements is definitely the exciting part of the Brag Journal. Reflecting on your work is the less enjoyable part, but it’s essential for continuous improvements. The common mistake is focusing most of the time on the bragging part and very little on the journaling.
If you want to make the most of this practice, fully commit to every part of it - it’s a great long-term investments and it’s going pay-off big time.
Some things to reflect on during journaling would be:
What should you do less or more?
Was there anything that you think you could have done better?
If you could introduce any improvement on the team or company level, what would it be?
Is there anything that you are missing at the moment?
What did you learn?
Did you enjoy your work? Why/Why not?
How would you rate your own performance?
How is your morale?
Include non-quantifiable work in Brag part
Some things are difficult to measure, but it doesn’t mean you should not include them! Contributing to some tricky system design work, unblocking engineers from other teams or starting writing a newsletter on Substack should definitely on the achievements list. This is also the part of your work that your manager might not be even aware of, especially in remote setting. Keeping track of all these initiatives is great for getting on the same page, especially during performance reviews.
Share the Journal with your Manager
And do it often, you can make it even a part of your 1-on-1s! Discussing your Brag Journal works very well for alignment and getting feedback about your work.
Conclude with actionable items
Whenever there are any actionable items (for example, when it’s clear that you should improve communication skills), add them to the to-do list and make sure you act on them.
To make sure that these are not merely items added for the sake of adding them, it’s a good idea to spend some time on reflecting on the progress on them.
Template
Use this template to make the most of your Brag Journaling.
There are a lot of categories there and not all of them will be applicable every time. But it’s simpler to remove not needed parts or keep them blank than add new ones.
The template covers:
Accomplishments
This is the primary Brag part of the Brag Journal
Notable initiatives you contributed to
Not the same as accomplishments, this one is more like status update. But for the notable initiatives.
Ideas you proposed
If there were some interesting initiatives or ideas you proposed, especially if they were well-received, make sure to brag about them!
How you helped other team members or other teams
Unblocking the team(s) is a high-value work that is very often undervalued, so make sure to include it as well.
Mentorship
Both the perspective of being a mentor and mentee.
Going the extra mile/Extraordinary effort
A bit different part than Accomplishments - it’s worth noting all the cases where you went the extra mile. This could be very useful in the context of promotions.
What you should do more
Things than are great and you should do more of them. It could be spending more time on mentoring, sharing knowledge or pair-programming.
What you should do less
Both things that you thought would be good ideas but turned out not to be that good and some clearly undesirable things
What you learned
Emphasize the things you did outside work - pet projects, books, courses…
What you could have done better
Even if things go well, it doesn’t mean it couldn’t be better. If you have a clear idea what you could have done better, note it down and make it an actionable point.
Things that could be improved on the team level
If there is anything on the team level that could be improved, don’t keep it in your head to forget later. Take a note of it and follow up with you manager.
Things that could be improved on the department/company level
Same as for the team-level improvements, but for the wider scope.
Books/Courses/Pet Projects in progress
Related to “What you learned” part - be specific what things are in progress
Progress on the to-do items from the previous journaling session
Review the actionable items from the previous sessions
To-do items
All the actionable items resulting from the current session
It’s also a good idea to rate your own performance and morale. It’s worth distinguishing these two - sometimes you might perform great despite low morale. And if that’s something that continues for at least few weeks, it’s likely that you performance will also suffer soon and this would be an early burn-out stage.
Also, if you think your performance is low, it’s an alarming sign that requires more reflection as well - think what is exactly causing this and what could be some next steps that you could make that would lead to improvement.
Wrapping up
Brag Journals can be a secret sauce to supercharge your career and improve continuously. It’s also an amazing tool to adapt by managers to improve the engineering culture within their teams to help grow the engineers way faster and make it easier to advocate for their promotions during performance calibrations.