Document Everything: The Secret to Measuring Progress

Do you ever feel totally lost? Do you ever feel unsure if you’re making any progress? You’re slogging along in your day job, or grinding away learning to code in the evenings, or putting in work on a side business, and you just have no idea if you’re moving the needle towards any of your goals. This doesn’t have to be work related, either. Maybe you’re trying to lose weight or pay down debt and you never feel the end is in sight.

I’ve been in all of those situations and felt all of those things:

Sometimes those fears materialized, sometimes they didn’t (thankfully I didn’t get fired from my first dev job). Either way, I got through them. Looking back over the long term, it’s easy to see how those events shaped me and how I was making progress. My “useless liberal arts degree” taught me how to research and teach complex ideas. Commission sales made me more resilient and got me out of my shy, introverted shell. Spending hundreds of hours building a video course laid the foundation of my career in developer relations.

But in the day-to-day grind, it didn’t feel like I was making progress. Objectively, I was making progress, but it wasn’t happening as fast as I wanted or in the way I expected it to.

What if we could capture those feelings and be able to see our progress day by day? We would have objective proof we were making progress when we didn’t feel it. It turns out we can do this and that it doesn’t take nearly the amount of effort you might guess. In fact, it only takes a few minutes a day.

How to Track Progress by Documenting Everything

I recently stumbled onto a Google doc that reminded me of a habit I got into a few years ago that was a huge game-changer despite being so simple. For several months at a time, every day I would jot down whatever I was working on or thinking about. I call this documenting everything.

Documenting everything means writing down as often and consistently as possible:

You might be thinking, “You mean journaling? Great job bud, you’ve invented journaling. So glad I subscribed to your groundbreaking newsletter!” It’s definitely a form of journaling (and I definitely didn’t invent it), but for some reason for me journaling feels like this Big Process with lots of Rules. I’m talking about sketching notes and jotting down feelings with no other purpose or overarching plan. You might even consider it a “Daily Stand-Up” meeting with yourself. It’s informal and just takes a few minutes a day, but it velds a huge amount of value.

Why document everything?

So why should you document everything? Here are a few of the benefits:

How do I start documenting everything?

If I’ve sold you on documenting everything, let me help you get started. Here’s what you’ll need to do:

  1. Pick an app or format that you can stick with. When I first started, I used a running Google doc that I kept open in a tab all day. I eventually started creating a new document each month. Later on I moved to Markdown and an app called Drafts. Don’t overthink this or over-research it, just pick something easy. Picking something and using it will help you figure out what you like or don’t like.
  2. You’re going to create an entry for each day, so first write out the date.
  3. For each entry, create two sections: what you’re working on and what are you thinking or feeling (I always just called this “Notes.”)
  4. Keep this document open and, any time you have a minute or two, jot down notes in either section. In the first section, you might break it up by project or just jot down a few words of what progress you’ve made that day. In the second section, you might jot down reflections on previous days, what’s working, what’s not working, or what you’re worried about. Think of this section as whatever is alive to you in that moment.
  5. The next morning, copy and paste the previous day, update the date, and clear out the notes section to start over. You could also do this at the end of the day if it might be a helpful shutdown ritual.

That’s it. Don’t judge anything you write down. Don’t think about someone else reading it. Write for no one else but you and be brutally honest with yourself. You can always edit it later if you decide to publish anything.

One other tip: don’t say you’re going to do this forever. You won’t, at least not until you build the habit long enough to start seeing results. Pick a period of time and commit to it. It might be 4 days, a week, 30 days, or 90 Days. Start small and build the habit, then work your way up. I found 90 day stretches to be the most useful once I got into it. It might take you a month or so to start seeing the benefits, but once you do you’ll start to get hooked. Another thing that helps with this is counting down instead of up. At the top of each entry, I would write “Day -90,” then “Day -89,” and so on. It helped me stick with it much more than slogging through Days 1 to 90 because I didn’t want to break the streak.

How to Go Deeper

Once you’ve built the habit and are starting to notice patterns, you can go deeper. You can:

Don’t worry about any of these things until you’ve got some experience under your belt. If you over-engineer too quickly, you’ll burn out and stop doing it. Just build the habit and see where it takes you.

This article began its life as an issue of the Developer Microskills Newsletter. Each week, I send out a practical, actionable way to improve as a developer and developer advocate. Sign up below!

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