Track Your Accomplishments

United States, 2002.

It’s easy to tell what a baseball player has accomplished.  Baseball fans love statistics, and everything a player does on the field – every hit, every strikeout, every walk, every stolen base, every run, every catch, and every error – is recorded.  When the Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz comes up to bat, the bottom of the screen will show his batting average, total home runs and RBI for the season; much more information is easily found in reference books or online.  All this data must be a great help for Ortiz when it comes time to negotiate a new contract; he can easily demonstrate how much he’s contributed to the team.

It isn’t so easy for the rest of us to measure our accomplishments, and most of us don’t even try.  Because we don’t record them, our accomplishments can fade from memory over time, as we turn our minds to new challenges and forget the details of what we’ve done in the past.  Where a baseball player has a permanent record of exactly how many hits he got two seasons ago, we may only remember the broad outline of the big project we worked on two years ago, and have a hard time recalling everything we contributed to making it a success.  And if you can’t remember your own accomplishments, you can be sure your boss and co-workers won’t remember them either.

That’s why you should start keeping a running list of your accomplishments.  Start the list today, and every time you accomplish something, add it to the list.

You can keep the list in a day planner, a notebook, a Phone, or a computer – whatever you find easiest.  Write down not only what you accomplished, but the measurable result for your employer or client, the more specific the better.  How many “runs” did you bat in?  How much money did you save for them?  Exactly how much did you increase their return on investment?

Accomplishments can be big, special projects – your home runs – but they can also be your normal, day to day work – your singles.  For those, just keep a running record of what you’ve done (“balanced company check register to the penny – 5th month in a row”) and how it’s helped the company.

This list of accomplishments will be invaluable during your next performance review, or when you seek a promotion, or when you need to convince someone to hire you, either as a consultant or employee.  It will give you a huge head start when it comes time to write or update your resume.  And when you’re feeling overwhelmed and useless, you can read your list to remind you of how much you’ve done.

One of my clients at Core Allies, LLC followed this advice and maintained a list of his accomplishments.  Three years into one job, a friend called to tell him about an opening in another company that would be his dream job.  The catch was that he needed an up-to-date resume by the next day.  No problem.  Using his list, he quickly updated his resume by adding three key accomplishments.  He got the job, but still maintains his list.  As he says, “You just never know.”