Stop Forgetting: How a Work Journal Fuels Your Software Engineering Career
How should a software engineer go about structurally capturing their contributions and impact and why does it matter?
Tell me if any of below scenarios seem familiar
Each annual performance year
Do you feel massive impostor syndrome as you start hunting down slack/teams group chat/channel post messages, emails and wiki’s/docs to piece together an impact story?
After an intense week at work, you are left wondering if you got anything actually done?
Did your work have any impact and is it appropriate to your scope and level at work?
You seemed to be busy all the time and were multi-tasking a lot. Where did all the time go?
Well, I used to face the same problem until I started keeping a work journal to track what I’ve been working on.
I’ve found this practice recommended by many senior and principal engineers and have been following this personally for the past 7 years at 4 different companies with some really good benefits.
What are some of these magical benefits?
Well …
You can read your journal and reflect on how the week went and what did you build/work on?
Read your past work and give a better standup update to your peers and leaders
Create a weekly summary for your leaders
Roll up a weekly updates into a monthly summary for broader discussion during one on ones
Automatically have bunch of data points around impact for your annual performance review
Your major projects/impact could even be something you can update in your LinkedIn or resume when the time comes around to search for a new gig. Having crisp impact stories are really effective during behavioral interviews for senior engineer interviews
With LLM (Large language models), you can use them to analyse and get some free brainstorming/coaching from your friendly AI (Artificial intelligence) model
It only takes ~10 mins out of your workday and this simple yet effective practice gives you the peace of mind that you don’t have to remember what the heck you have been doing at work over the past year.
In this blog, Let me share my personal approach and template with you. If you like it, feel free to steal it and adapt to your own needs.