Celebrating achievements

Let's talk about celebrating our successes. Laura Gaetano mentioned the "Brag Document", which allows you to "record your big and small achievements". I think this is an important and valuable concept. It is a productive concept.

Our active memory can be like a cache of recently used data. Fresh ideas and frustrations supersede older ones. The older the thought, the fuzzier it becomes. Details are lost.

There is also negativity bias. When good and bad things happen at the same intensity, the bad ones have a greater effect on us.

These two factors can also affect us during our work weeks. We can start each week with a fresh mind, but as the days go by, the details get lost. Monday and Tuesday become a pale memory by the time we reach Friday. Negative memories can have a greater impact. Stress and fatigue can accumulate throughout the week, overshadowing the small successes we have achieved. This mood, if left unchecked, can spill over into the next week, negatively impacting it and leading to burnout in the long run.

Just look at my week. It was fine, but Thursday was pretty much wasted due to Google Vertex AI issues. Without outside help, all I remembered was disliking Kubeflow-like system quirks, bugs in the Google Vertex AI platform, and YAML.

But Vertex doesn't have to be the only thing I remember from that week, even if it was the last. This overview helps.

Bugs in Vertex don't have to be the only thing I remember from this week. Instead of letting our memories dictate our perceptions, we could take control of the process and make it less biased. A journal, a list of accomplishments, a "DONE" perspective in a task manager — all of these can help.

Here's how it works for me

I try to record things that happen to me during the week in a journal. This relieves my mind of unnecessary details and leaves a trail of breadcrumbs in case I ever need to retrace my steps. At the end of the week, I can look back and see the big picture, unbiased by recent emotions. There's no need to read all the details, just glancing at the headlines is enough. Especially if you group them by topic and put little emojis in front 👍. Most of the time, reviewing a journal is like, "I got more done than I thought I would" or "Hmm, it wasn't that bad!"; when planning the next week, I could build on the highlights of the previous week without letting the last few unhappy days get me down.

Do you keep a document to show off?