Accelerate your software engineering career by tracking your work

Your manager doesn’t know what you’re doing. They do know about things you should be doing they care about but you’re doing much more than that. You’re probably doing much more than even you think you’re doing. So, if even you don’t know what you’re doing why would you expect your manager to know this?

To know what you’re doing you need to track your work. The reason to do this is to be able to easily answer the following questions:

• What am I doing? – helps confirm you’re working on the right things
• What am I not doing? – helps ensure you’re not dropping the ball on important work
• What I’ve accomplished this year/half/quarter? – makes all career, performance review and promotion discussions much easier

There are many ways to track work. You’ll need to find what works for you. I do it in a very simple way. Each year I create a Google doc for tracking my work for the given year. It has two sections:

• What I’ve completed
• A weekly list of tasks or projects I need to work on

Each Monday morning I spend 10-15 minutes to update this doc. I go over last week’s work items and move completed ones to the ‘completed’ section. I strikethrough work items that are no longer needed or I decided not to do. I copy the remaining ones as this week’s tasks. Finally, if there is any new work, I add it.

I attach artifacts to most items in the ‘completed’ section. They are a tool I or my manager can use to showcase my work and support my career related discussions. Here are examples of what I include:

• Links to design docs, posts, roll out plans, etc.
• References to diffs where I influenced the design or prevented serious issues
• Other teams’ projects I helped unblock
• Details about why something I did was hard

There is no one correct answer as to what granularity to track the completed items at. I found including smaller work items is worthwhile. Some of them are too small to matter by themselves but they add up. The secret is to group them in coherent themes. For instance, adding a couple tests will not get you to the next level but if you have done this multiple times you might have significantly increased the test coverage for your team or product which could be an additional argument to support your promotion.

Starting to track my work was one of the best things I’ve done for my career. It takes just a few minutes per week but gives me the clarity I need and saves me a ton of time during performance reviews. If you’re not tracking your work, I strongly encourage you to start.