A second brain to help your professional career.

As humans, we have a hard time acknowledging and remembering all our achievements. Part of it is due to biases, and the other part is due to the fact our brain can only store so much information. I’ve been a victim of it myself and I’ve witnessed others who were also prone to this when discussing performance reviews.

We may even reach the point where we ignore past accomplishments and discredit ourselves if we feel we’ve not been performing well in recent events, combining both recency bias and self-depreciation - a terrible combo.

Falling prey to that behavior can hurt you in several professional settings such as:

  • During performance reviews, when you have to write a self-review but you have trouble remembering your accomplishments since your last review;
  • When looking for a promotion, not being able to prove your case because you don’t remember achievements that would make solid arguments for items in your competency matrix;
  • When interviewing for a job, not remembering situations that would help you prove you have the experience required. Nothing better than a good story to prove your experience.

Let’s see how we can overcome that behavior!

A Second Brain

The easiest way to fight the recency bias and to stop forgetting your achievements is to document what you do. There are many ways to do it, find the one that makes it the easiest for you to do it regularly.

For example, you can have a running document where you list your achievements by month. If your company has a list of competencies for your role with criteria per level (junior, senior…), you can use a spreadsheet where each line is a competency. The first column is the name of the competency, the following ones are the criteria for each level, and the last one is where you write your achievements that support that competency. You’ll notice the level you’re at, and be reminded what you should achieve to reach the next level.

Next, you wanna make sure you write information in a way that will make sense to you in 6 months or a year. The reason is that at the moment, what you’ll write will make sense to you because the context is recent, but in 6 months, you’ll have forgotten about it. That’s why you’ll want to be specific and provide enough context.

The CAR framework (“Context, Action, Result”) is a solid way of doing so. Each item you will write will have these components:

  • Context: what is the situation (e.g. “The creative team experienced issues with Git.”);
  • Action: the steps you took (e.g. “I discussed with the team to identify their pain points, […], I set up a Perforce server they can use to store their assets.”);
  • Result: the impact of what you did (e.g. “The creative team now has a better workflow, and their productivity increased.”).

Finally, you need to decide on the frequency at which you write this information. I recommend every 1-2 weeks, above that it becomes easy to lose track of what has been done, and that’s what we’re trying to avoid. At the time of writing this article, I block 30 minutes on my calendar every Friday for my self-review, because what I did during the week is still fresh in my mind.

Calibrating Your Objectivity Scale

If you’re doing creative work and release one of your works (e.g. a photograph, a video game, an artwork…), you could get a hundred positive feedback, and a single negative one. Which one is your mind going to focus on? You guessed it, it’s gonna be focused on the negative one. That’s the negativity bias in action. This bias can be so strong that it can make you doubt yourself, and discredit your past achievements.

Thanks to documenting your achievements, you’ve taken a step toward overcoming this behavior, given that you were objective enough during your self-reviews. Because you tracked your previous accomplishments, you’ll be able to go back to them, read them, and remind yourself you’re not doing so bad after all, it will help you to see past the negative feedback you experienced.

If documenting is not enough for you to acknowledge your achievements, you could reach out to someone working closely with you, it could be a co-worker or your manager. They should have a good understanding of the work you’re doing so they can help you see the positive part of it. A simple way to drive that conversation is to detail your recent work and ask them what they think about it. Depending on your relationship with that person, you could also let yourself be more vulnerable and express that you doubt the work you did, and they can help you with positive or constructive feedback.

What Can I Do If I Need This Information Now?

You might read this article as a performance review is coming up soon and wonder how to go about it since you haven’t written yet your accomplishments. Here are a few ways I can think of to start gathering data to help you out:

  • Browse through available data (e.g. if you’re an engineer, look through your commit history/PRs, look through Slack channels you use frequently, look at your calendar from the past months to see meetings you’ve been part of, look at the project management tool your company uses to see tasks you’ve completed…).
  • Reach out to co-workers - ask them if they recall any work you’ve done together which had a significant impact.
  • Reach out to your manager - they’re here to support you, they should be able to tell you the major accomplishments they’ve seen you do since the last performance review.

At first, getting into this habit might feel like a lot, I’d suggest you try it a couple of times so you get more familiar with this process. The first time it’ll take a bit longer for you to get set up, but with every self-review, you’ll spend less time until it takes you 10-15 minutes to complete. Then you can judge whether this workflow is for you or not, we all function in different ways.

Whether you decide to keep going with this habit or not, I’d advise you to adopt one with a similar outcome. Having all this data at hand will help you in different contexts, writing faster and more accurate self-reviews for performance reviews, making more qualitative cases for promotions with data-backed arguments, and being more convincing during interviews with your catalog of stories you created over time.

It’s a small habit that can have a big impact.