It's Performance Review Season!

The Holiday season is almost upon us. Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas, New Year’s Day, and… Your annual performance review.

Different companies have different processes and objectives for this review. At some places, it is used to rank you against your peers. Other, more forward thinking companies use the process as a tool to make their employees better, although the tool is fairly blunt and doesn’t work all the time.

What’s common, however, is that we need to remind our boss that we’re good at what we do. Either we are looking at a bigger raise in the follow up Merit Increase season, or we want to score that promotion to the next level.

But… Do you remember what you did this year?

We’ve all sat at our desk trying to answer this darned question.

As creatives, it can be hard sometimes to remember what we worked on just yesterday. It can be even harder to remember what we did last month. Remembering what we were up to twelves months ago? That’s almost impossible.

To help us, we look at old work tickets, search through emails, or even look are our calendar invites from 10 months ago. We get carpal tunnel syndrome from all the scrolling up in various Slack channels, looking for anything important we might have been a part of. Some years, we remember we did something worth bringing up, but with the passage of time, it doesn’t really feel that important anymore. Should it even be mentioned?

There is a solution to this, and it only takes a few minutes every day: write a daily work log.

The work log

Maintaining a daily work log can be an incredibly useful practice to resolve this problem. It can be a simple document that you open up every day to add an entry. I’ve been using a plain text file that I commit to using git, a tool coders use to keep track of changes they make to the software they’re building.

Whatever you use, the key is that it must be easy to access and write to, otherwise we’ll find a million reasons not to go write our work log at the end of a particular day. It must also be searchable and readable.

What does a work log look like?

Every day, make an entry into your work log and be sure to add the date. Below that, you should write down the projects you’ve been working on as top level items, followed by some details.

For example, this is an entry I wrote last week in my work log:

## Tue Nov 11 2025

- Finding Work
  - A recruiter reached out about a possible position in Austin.
  - Booked some time on his calendar

- Journal App
  - Improved the Figma design. It's more responsive now
  - [plan] Still planning to start the design of the evented architecture

Spoiler alert: I’m both looking for work and trying to build an app that people will be able to use to write their work logs.

My work log entries are done using markdown syntax, but yours don’t have to be. What is important, though, is to have some structure that is repeatable. This will improve your ability to scan the document at a glance, or search through it at the end of the year.

My logs are dated using the Www Mmm dd yyyy date format, where Www represents the day of the week using three letters only, Mmm is the month of the year, again with just three letters, dd is the day and yyyy is the year.

I use that format because it’s what my Mac shows in the top right corner of the screen at all times, so it’s pretty easy for me to see and copy it.

Then, I list my projects that I’ve worked on that day. In the example above, I only worked on two projects: Finding Work and Journal App. I have many more ongoing projects, but on that day, I only worked on those two.

Finally, under each project, I list the work I did on that particular day in more details as list items. I indent the details a little bit so they visibly look like they belong to that project.

When I’m reading back that entry, I immediately remember that I spent a lot of time that day tweaking the Figma design for my Journaling app to make it more responsible to size changes. I can also go read previous entries and see that I had just started learning Figma a few days prior to that.

Whatever format you choose to use is up to you. The key is being consistent over time.

Start today!

Because we are getting close to performance review season, the best time to start your work log was last year, unfortunately. But to get a head start on next year, you should start your daily practice today.

Try it! The five minutes you spend at the end of each day will be refunded ten times in the future.