I keep a journal, because otherwise I tend to forget or minimize much of what I've done. It helps me remember the big things when it comes time for performance

I keep a journal, because otherwise I tend to forget or minimize much of what I've done. It helps me remember the big things when it comes time for performance reviews, and it also helps me remember the small things with accurate sprint retrospectives. Spending several hours per week fighting with environments, retrofitting code to ancient dependencies, and investigating build failures that turn out to be local to one person's laptop are time sucks that need to be called out in retrospectives so that people understand the potential value of paying down technical debt. Those things are also exactly what I tend to forget about by the end of the week. My journal consists of a notebook with a new note for each day, titled with the date for easy sorting. I copy/paste in a template that looks like this: Morning checklist: _ Check email _ Check Slack _ Make sure my tickets are in the correct state _ Look at the meetings on my calendar and decided how to prepare (or not) for each one (etc.) Plan today: Actual today: I love the morning checklist because it ensures that if I space on one of those items during the day, like updating a ticket, it'll get taken care of the next morning. Trusting this part of the process takes a lot of stress out of the rest of the day. After I make my plan for the day, I don't touch that section again. That way I can compare and contrast my plan with what actually happened. It can be enlightening to look back and see that a development project was in my plan every morning for a week, and my "actual" was dominated by production support and fighting with test environments. The best part is that since I started keeping a journal like this, I've realized I get way more done than I give myself credit for.