Edition 4 : Tech Brag Documents with Free Notion Template

Hello my lovely subscribers! Sorry I've been gone for a little while. I was dealing with personal and health issues, which meant I had to put the brakes on my newsletter for a bit.

But I'm back with a bang to tell you all about brag documents and to share a completely free Notion template?? Click here to download.

What is a brag document?

Julia Evans popularised the brag document with her article which you can read here.

Julia says:

There’s this idea that, if you do great work at your job, people will (or should!) automatically recognise that work and reward you for it with promotions / increased pay. In practice, it’s often more complicated than that – some kinds of important work are more visible/memorable than others. It’s frustrating to have done something really important and later realize that you didn’t get rewarded for it just because the people making the decision didn’t understand or remember what you did. So I want to talk about a tactic that I and lots of people I work with have used - brag docs!

This is true, it's not enough to do good work, you have to make it visible too. This is even more important if you work remotely!

Things a brag doc can help with:

• Pay reviews
• Promotion reviews
• Competency-based interviews
• Updating your CV
• 1-1's with your manager
• Building your confidence
• Self-reflection

How to keep a brag doc

• There is no right or wrong way to keep a brag doc; you might be old school and love pen to paper. You might like a simple excel sheet or word doc. Or you might want something a bit more functional and comprehensive which is something my free Notion template can help with!
• As our brains lose details the more time passes, it's important to keep a regular cadence with your brag doc. As a minimum, you should be filling it in every week, but ideally, setting out 15 minutes at the end of every day. We also tend to focus on the bad things, once you start to use your brag doc regularly you'll realise just how much amazing work you're doing!

• The level of detail is up to you. You may have a good memory, and just brief entries will help jog it. Or if you're like me and your brain is like a sieve, you can write down every detail in your brag doc.
• You should try to use the STAR technique when creating entries, the entries in my Notion template have boxes with prompts which loosely follow this technique.
• Just a little tip for anyone whose organisation uses Slack: forward yourself any messages you get with kudos or recognition. You can also send yourself direct messages on slack to yourself with anything to add to your brag doc when you sit down to fill it in weekly or monthly. Since you're probably on Slack most of the day anyway ?? this reduces time you'll spend filling in your doc. You can also set recurring reminders in Slack to remind you to fill in your doc.

When I joined xDesign last year and I started using brag docs , I used to focus on something which I came to learn has an actual name: organisational currency. This is a concept I learnt from the book "The No Club" which is the things your business finds value in. I came to realise that this isn't the only thing that matters to me and I want to document my personal currency too. I started to include things that I wouldn't necessarily talk about in a big review but they're things I've done which I'm proud of and I want to be able to go back and read on a rainy day!

Free Notion Brag Doc Template

Now for the good stuff! I've spent the last few months building a fully functional brag doc template on Notion.

You can download the template here for free - click here. (There is an optional payment of ￡5 if you're feeling generous ??)

The brag doc has automated recurring templates for weekly entries, pre-populated entries with boxes to fill in and it is also customisable to suit you and your role.

The video below shows you around the brag doc:

I hope you enjoy using the template and please share the Gumroad link with anyone you think might benefit from using the brag doc!

Thanks for reading and stay fabulous!

Parul x