#10 Create Your Brag Document 🎖️

A Guide for Tracking Your Career Achievements

Imagine your performance review is coming up in, let’s say in two weeks, and you want to highlight the skills and areas you've developed over the past ~6 months. First questions pop up:

1. Do you remember everything you’ve worked on?

2. Do you remember your role in Project A? What were your key contributions?

3. Are there any valuable metrics worth sharing? Do you have them written down somewhere?

Maybe you have some answers to them, but not with the right details, right?

Now imagine you’re currently preparing for interviews. Other questions pop up:

1. Is your resume up to date?

2. Can you highlight your most recent accomplishment(s) in an interview?

3. Do you remember that impressive project you worked on a year ago?

Depends on the situation, you’ll still need some time to prepare, right?

Now these scenarios often cause a lot of friction in terms of preparation. Is there a way to reduce that friction and make the overall process relatively smooth?

That’s where Brag Documents come in. 🎖️

In this post, I’ll explain what a brag document is, what it is not, and how to start using one effectively. Also at the end of this post, you’ll find a free template for you to get started!

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What is a Brag Document

A brag document is a long-living document that tracks the highlights of your career.

Throughout your career, you’ll achieve different milestones, embrace success stories (and failures!), and celebrate personal accomplishments. It’s important to capture all of these in a single, well-structured place. A brag document helps you do just that.

Instead of relying on your memory to remember all the details, you can record them in a single document that you can access at anytime or any place, and update it every, let’s say 4-8 weeks, or whenever you complete a new project.

Your Brag Document is the trailer to your movie: Your Career 🎥

A brag document is a collection of entries, with each entry representing a project or a large task you’ve worked on. It describes your role and responsibilities, the actions you took, and the results achieved based on those actions.

An example of an entry structure could be:

1. Context: Describe the project. When was it? What was your role? Are there any details needed for others to understand your actions?

2. Actions: Explain what you did in that context. What actions did you take? How did you solve problem X or handle situation Y?

3. Results: What was the outcome of your actions? How did your efforts lead to these results? If you can add any useful metrics that would be also great.

Maintaining a brag document should be easy. You don’t need to update it every week—just add to it whenever you complete a new milestone.

This small habit of keeping an up-to-date brag document can have a significant impact on your career. Your future self will thank you for it!

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What a Brag Document is not

Be careful, though—a brag document should capture your great work, not all your work.

It’s not meant to be a work log or daily diary. Instead, it should highlight key achievements, impactful contributions, and new skills gained, rather than listing every task. Overloading it with unnecessary details can make it harder to skim through and less motivating for you to maintain.

The power of brag documents comes from its concise summary and accessibility!

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Start Your Own Brag Document

A brag document can take many forms—it can be a Microsoft Word document on your laptop, an online Google Doc, a note-taking app on your phone, etc.

Ideally, it should be an online document that you can easily edit from anywhere—whether on your laptop, phone, etc. Personally, I use Notion from both my phone and laptop to keep mine up to date.

If you want to start one on Notion, here’s the link to the free template for you to check out! Feel free to make a copy and adjust to your preferences.

PS: If you haven’t used Notion before and would like a quick crash course (< 2 hour), check out my Udemy course Productivity with Notion 101 (discount included in the link!).

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Conclusion

Brag documents are powerful because they allow you to:

• Record all the impactful work you’ve accomplished.

• Prepare for upcoming performance review in no time.

• Serve as a reference document when writing or updating your resume.

• Help you prepare for introductory / behavioural interviews.

After all, since we’re designing and maintaining databases at work, why not have one for ourselves?

CREATE TABLE Brags (Context TEXT, Actions TEXT, Results TEXT);