Annual reviews used to involve spending a stupid amount of time sitting and thinking back over the past year of what I’d done. I’ve never been the most organized person, but I’ve been able to improve some of these processes steadily, and at some point, I stumbled upon the concept of a Brag Doc.

At its core, a Brag Doc is a log of things you’ve done over a year. The goal is to make annual reviews take less time and be more beneficial in the long run. Like a Resume, your review will look better with concrete numbers and metrics, which is tough to come up with in the cram sessions of filling these reviews out last minute.

I’ve found that having a running note in Obsidian, my tool of choice for Personal Knowledge Management, is the most effective for long-term storage and retrieval. When I receive positive feedback, ship a feature, or get a shoutout, it goes into the Brag Doc with identifying information: the date, who it came from, and the feature or improvements made.

Turning this capture into a daily or weekly habit can also help in other ways. You can look back on what you’ve done and reflect on what you would do differently with the information you know now. Or to hype yourself up when you feel like nothing is going right and you’re an imposter, especially in software. It can even lead you to create your own Personal Knowledge Management system or Second Brain.