Have you thanked "past you" lately?

Today I had to take a moment to pause and thank myself for something I did 3 weeks ago. I had a meeting on my calendar today that at a glance, I wasn't sure what it was about. I knew I had scheduled the meeting, its color code told me it was an action item from an incident I had reviewed. When I opened the calendar invite I was thrilled to see that I had given myself and other meeting attendees a detailed agenda and links to the incident review document. Melissa from 3 weeks ago had taken the time to create a JIRA ticket outlining the problem I was trying to solve and the steps I had taken so far. My 30 minute scheduled meeting lasted 10 minutes with an agreed upon plan of action from all meeting attendees. This was in part because I was able to clearly state the problem, action items already taken, and recommended steps for solution. They were all right there in the homework I had taken the time to do weeks before.

When I set up the root cause program for my company's engineering department I made a decision to track the incident reviews in JIRA. This required me to write up an executive summary after each meeting with a breakdown of what happened, why it happened and list action items to mitigate the issue. I added in several fields of items I wanted to track in order to capture data, and linked all action item tickets. 1100 tickets later, I am in awe of the data I have access to all because "past me" was willing to put the time in and was diligent about completing the work. I am able to surface themes, positive trends and systemic issues all from the data in my tickets. My colleagues are able to access the same data via several dashboards.

It is so easy for me to focus on my missteps or things I could have done better in the past. It is really nice to take a step back and appreciate the work I've done to make my world easier in the future. Thanking myself always puts a smile on my face and reinforces the habit I am appreciating.

What has 'past you' done lately that is overdue for a thank you?