Start capturing for your brag book!

I was lurking in an International Women's Day session and they were talking about logging wins and I couldn't help but blurt out 'brag book' in the comments.

It's also funny now, because whenever that term comes up, I always think of Cassandra Leung.

Why? You may ask. It's because she did a talk "How to make your work - and achievements - more visible" and as part of that she spoke about maintaining a bragboard (a visual document like a Miro board or Trello) throughout the year. This reduces the "cognitive load" for your manager during review season. Instead of them struggling to remember what you've done recently, you hand them a pre-mapped map of your wins. You can find a bragboard template on her blog.

A few years back, I used Notion religiously for taking notes. I still do for my separate community stuff, but I've now been reflecting on how I can do it in today's world and for my own tech career.

I'm a knowledge management geek, both from a personal and community perspective, and now with AI I want to experiment with how video, audio and text can be used to log things for me to resurface later. I will likely not only use it as a brag book, but also for inspiration for many things.

I'm sure there are a million tools out there to take notes, but I'm reluctant to pick up a new one, because of the likelihood that I will all too easily fall out of the habit.

Part of me is thinking that I could just use Google Docs to log things. Another part of me wants to dump things into a private channel on Slack, that caters for video, audio, text and links. Then every so often I can copy it over somewhere else.

Another part of me thinks about exploring the latest notetaking app that is AI enabled, but also, from previous experience it can be risky adopting new tools for them to only disappear further down the line. Obsidian or Google Docs is probably a safe bet for general note capturing.

I also think about gathering some of the bits and then logging it into The MoTaverse as a moment. That could be fun. In a sense, the MoTaverse already logs a bunch of what I do, so maybe I can just level it up a bit. Maybe it's a bit like a brag board in public, but also adding learnings to it so that it can be useful to others. And I guess, this is what I am doing now. And it feels good!

I'm going to keep pondering on this, but as with all these things, capturing the brags is important, if you don't capture them, then you can't process them.

Start capturing, process and publish later. In a sense, it also becomes a source of ideas for blogs, articles, talks and workshops.