Every now and then, I find myself wondering if I’m consistently focusing on the wrong things or unnecessary things while working. I’m not one who constantly pours myself over conversion metrics or other KPIs or numbers I need to “track” as a means to measure my impact as a designer, but maybe I need to learn how to be?

A few years ago, my friends recommended I set up a brag document for myself, and to help fight the mental health downs, also collate all the positive feedback I’ve gotten from people over the years. I did make one before—for the latter, I made a FigJam file where I would paste screenshots of messages I got from friends and former clients, and also note specific things I heard from people via sticky notes—but it’s been… maybe 2 years since I last updated it?

And I think I need to rethink how I note those down, hopefully so I could find it easier to note these things in the future so that when I need it the most, I can just go through the past notes I’ve left myself and hopefully raise my spirits a bit.

On the brag document: this is still something I’m struggling with. I recently found myself disappointed on the result of my mid-year assessment at work, where despite getting 4’s and 5’s (on a 5-point rating scale with the usual score as 3) on a lot of the goals we set up at the start of the year, I still just ended up with a 3. This frustrated me, but after some discussion with my lead, I also understood why this was the case: I had nothing to prove my “impact”. No other evidence—other than showing up and delivering my usual output, I guess—to demonstrate how I “went above and beyond” what was asked of me.

That still sucks, honestly. One thing I don’t like is having to explain or justify my actions even if I’ve already done my part in… well, delivering. But I guess this is why things like OKRs and KPIs exist, so people can’t “game” the system too and abuse it to their benefit just willy-nilly. I understand that angle, I really do.

So now we go back to having the brag document, or possibly just listing the before and after analytics numbers of whatever it is you’re working on to see if what I helped build changed for the better. I’m still thinking of how best I could document this in a way that would not be tedious for me to help incentivize actually doing it.

So far, it seems like FigJam could be an “easy” way to just dump a bunch of screenshots and notes together, but the fact that I have to open Figma just to put notes there might be too much of a task for me sometimes (?). I’m not sure.

Another option I can think of now, given my explorations with Obsidian, is I could set up a template or a folder in my personal vault the way I do my daily and weekly notes: have one note template for documenting the actual impact, and have another note that visualizes the data found in the impact notes. I don’t know yet how to achieve this. It’s all still hypothetical in my head; I’ve yet to search and study how to set that up so it would work for me.

Hopefully after this post, I update it to share that I’ve finally figured out something that works for me. I’ve relied on my memory for so long for this kind of thing, and I think cracks are starting to form in that method. I’m starting to forget certain details of things that happened a week—hell, sometimes even a day—before. I’ll do my best to make do with what I have, and on this note, that is technology that I use frequently: my PC, my Obsidian setup (so far), and phone that also has access to my Obsidian vault.

Wish me luck.