During the initial years of my career like any engineer, I gave importance to reading technical books, writing scripts and considered MS word and excel tasks as useless and boring. My year long goals, if not given by manager used to be less than 10 lines and year end review updates were not more than 5 lines. For me, writing that was a big deal as I felt that the person with whom I’m gonna have the conversation, my manager knows the work and efforts that I have put the whole year. Why waste time writing the same. It’s understood!
For any individual contributer, documentation is seen as admin work, a burden better left for “later.” But “later” often arrives at the worst possible moment a outage issue, a handover or that awkward promotion discussion where you’re asked, “What exactly did you drive last year?” Without evidence, your hard work becomes invisible. And in corporate life, invisibility is career kryptonite.
So it took me years to realise the importance of the same as even a small documentation helped me during communications or even remembering what I delivered like 5 months back. Outcome of the habit was amazing.
The solution isn’t to write essays. It’s to build habits of clarity: capturing decisions made, context, actions taken and even appreciations attached, in a way that’s short, searchable, and shareable. It’s about taking 5 mins at the start of the year, to create a system which is easy for you to input but also to fetch data at ease in future. Think of it as leaving behind “career breadcrumbs” so when someone follows the trail, they see your competence shining through.
As we are in the AI era, things are much better. We now have tools that can transcribe meetings, summarize emails, and even auto-draft first versions of documents. But here’s the catch: AI can only process what you feed it. The effort and ideas still need to come from you which is your judgment, your context, your need and your “why.”
AI may write the skeleton, but you decide the bones that matter. In other words: don’t outsource your career story, but do let tech speed up the boring parts.
Take it a step forward, when you consulting with aaiish, you can seek help to build a template based on your area of work. Create a system and future-proof the way your career is remembered.
