Something to readReviews & performance
Get your work recognized: write a brag document
A 12-minute essay on keeping a running record of your work, so you and your manager remember it at review time
Why it’s worth your time
Nobody remembers everything you did this year, including you, and that matters most when someone is deciding your review or promotion. Julia Evans, a software engineer and writer, describes keeping a brag document: a running list of your work, its impact and the quieter things you contributed, shared with your manager before review season. Keeping it up can take a few minutes every couple of weeks, and it also shows you patterns in your own work.
How to write a brag document
The essay · 12 min · Free
How to get it
Opens their site. We don’t copy it here; we’d rather they get the read.
- Read the essay.
The first half makes the case and explains sharing the document with your manager and peer reviewers. Don't skip the section on fuzzy work, the projects that are hard to quantify: Evans points out that this is exactly the work that tends to get left out of brag documents. The template at the end is ready to copy.
- Start your brag document with three things.
Open a document with your name and this year as the title. Write three things from the last few months: what you did, who it helped and what changed because of it. Make one of them the quiet kind, like mentoring someone or fixing a process nobody else would.
Good moments for this: before a reviewevery couple of weekswhen you get a new manager
Keep going with Truest
Small actions add up. Truest helps you find the next thing worth doing, make the space to do it, and keep a record of your progress. It’s a private place to work on your career, and it’s yours, not your employer’s.
- It actually happensWe’ll put it on your calendar and remind you before it starts.
- A living page in your VaultKeep it as one page you add to, next to your reviews and your files.
- It’s yours to keepEach thing you do is saved to your private record, there when your next review or job search comes around.
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
Evans is clear that the point isn't to inflate. Plain, specific claims with a result attached tend to land better than adjectives, and they're easier to stand behind when someone asks a follow-up question.
What might make this harder
Write it as a record, not a pitch: what happened, what you did, what changed. The name is tongue in cheek; the content can be completely plain.
Questions people ask
What is a brag document?
A running document of what you've accomplished at work, the impact it had and the less visible ways you contributed, kept so you and your manager can refer to it at review and promotion time. Evans has also heard it called a hype document.
What should go in a brag document?
Evans's template covers goals, projects with your contribution and their impact, collaboration and mentoring, design and documentation, work that helped the wider company, what you learned, and things outside work.
Should I share my brag document with my manager?
Evans recommends it. Her manager found it made writing her review easier, and it helps any manager who has to explain to others why you deserve a strong rating or a promotion.
How often should I update a brag document?
As often as you'll actually keep it up. Evans says others have told her a few minutes every two weeks works best for them; she prefers one longer session every six months or a year. Updating as you go is usually easier than rebuilding a year at once.
What it says, and how it holds up
Review season has a familiar first feeling: a blank where the last six months should be. Julia Evans wrote this in 2019 after noticing how often she had to dig through tickets, design documents and launch emails to rediscover work she'd entirely forgotten, from mentoring an intern to a small security project. If you can't remember what you did, your manager probably can't either. And your manager is often the one who has to explain your work to people who have never seen it.
The essay is practical from start to finish: keep the list, share it with your manager and peer reviewers, write the big picture of what you've been focused on, and use it to notice your own patterns, like which projects you're proudest of and what you'd want more or less of. It began, she explains, with a colleague and a workshop to help women engineers advocate for themselves in reviews, which is why the name nudges toward bragging. It's written for software engineers, but the template carries over to most jobs with a change of vocabulary.
The approach assumes someone reads it. A brag document does the most good where reviews are written by people trying to get them right. Where ratings are set by forced curves or politics, a well-kept record still helps, but it won't overrule the system; there it's most useful as your own memory and as material for a job search.
When the evidence is already there and nobody's acting on it, the record isn't the missing piece. The next move is to ask your manager, plainly, what a promotion or raise would actually take. And if you're heading into a job search, the same list is the raw material for a résumé, which still needs its own shaping.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.