Log Your Work
This one may seem like a no-brainer, but… log your work! We cannot expect to get credit for things that are not noted down somewhere. I cannot tell you how many individuals I have seen (because the number is too large to remember) who do a lot of work, like a lot, a lot - and fail to note the work they have done. We are all taught to be modest, and that showboating, or talking about our many accomplishments, is seen as prideful and vain. The issue with that teaching is that while it helps you become a more likeable person, it harms and even stunts your professional life.
Being ‘seen’ in the workplace means being caught doing work, whether good or bad. To get caught doing good work, you have to act like a human billboard and market all the great work you have been doing for your team, department, and company. To successfully market your work, you first need to track it effectively. Does this mean you will be spending an extra few minutes logging the high-level details of what you have been working on somewhere? Yes, and that is exactly what you should be doing, or start doing. When logging work, here are a few things to consider…
Your team may already use tracking tools - If you work on an information technology team, or a team that has a project manager, odds are you may already be using a platform called Jira, or Jira Align (depending on a multitude of things, but both are similar enough). In that platform, each task should have an associated ticket created for it to log the work that will eventually be done. Usually, tickets are made if the time it takes to do the task is longer than the time it takes to make a ticket in Jira… properly. The point is this… find what tools your team may already use to log work, make sure you are using them to log all the work that makes sense to log (not sure? ask a team member), and log it properly so when you look back on the completed ticket, you can tell what it is you worked on. Does your team not have a tool like Jira? Create a Word document to log your work for now, find a tool you think may be helpful, and propose it to your team leadership.
You are selling yourself constantly - Like it or not, we are all in sales. Now, we may not all be trying to sell someone a used or new car, but we are trying to sell ourselves… constantly. For example, through this blog, my newsletter, my social media accounts, and everything else you can find on this website, I am trying to sell myself and my services to you. Whether I am doing a good enough job to warrant any of your time or business is up to you (if I am not, I would love to hear your feedback - feel free to contact me), but you are doing the same every day. When you go to work, your performance and how you communicate that performance may be the determining factor between you having a job or not. It may also be the determining factor between no promotion, a promotion in five years, or a promotion every year or two for the length of your career. Logging your work makes selling yourself that much easier.
Receipts help you keep your job and get promoted - Have you ever been in a heated email chain at work where someone is trying to get you to mess up and say something that will get you in trouble? How about where an individual who does not like you says you said something to them over email, only for you to show the email chain and prove they are in the wrong instead? No? Let us hope you don’t have to experience that, but that example highlights the importance of receipts to prove what actually happened. The same is true for the work you have completed. When you have done something, mark it down somewhere you can easily show others in case you are questioned or need it to prove your value. Without a log of what you have done, it is all hearsay, and like in a courtroom, hearsay won’t get you very far.
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Till next time,
