You know you should keep a brag doc. If your manager didn’t recommend it, a career advice blog post definitely did. But every time review season rolls around, you’re excavating months of Slack threads, Jira tickets, and half-remembered wins, trying to reconstruct what you actually did — and why it mattered.
The advice is right. The process is broken.
Here’s how to fix it.
Key takeaways:
- Most brag docs fail because they’re written reactively
- Writing and maintaining brag docs manually can take 30-60 minutes every week
- Automating weekly achievement summaries with Steady gives you time back each week and makes preparing for performance reviews a 5-minute task
Why brag docs feel like a second job
Let’s be honest about what writing a brag doc actually entails.
You need to remember what you shipped. You need to find the pull request, the ticket, the Slack message where someone said something nice. You need to frame it in terms of impact, not just activity. Then you need to write it up in a way that doesn’t sound like you’re reading your own LinkedIn endorsements out loud.
It’s not that the work wasn’t done. Your output lives in fragments across a dozen tools — commits in GitHub, stories in Linear, tasks in Asana, conversations in Slack — and no one puts it back together.
Atlassian’s 2025 research found that knowledge workers spend 25% of their workweek just searching for information. Not doing work. Finding it. Brag docs are just another version of this problem: your achievements are scattered, and reconstructing them costs time you don’t have.
This is why most people skip the brag doc entirely and end up scrambling before performance reviews. Or they write something thin with a recency bias that undersells months of real impact.
The case for automating it
There’s a legitimate debate about whether engineers should have to maintain their own visibility at work. One argument — made compellingly by managers who’ve reflected on their own practices — is that requiring self-promotion penalizes people with strong execution skills and weaker marketing instincts. Visibility maintenance, the argument goes, is a manager’s job.
That argument is right. And it won’t help you in your next review.
Until the culture catches up to the principle, you need a system. And the best system is one that runs without you.
The goal isn’t to become a better self-promoter. It’s to stop doing the manual work of tracking your own accomplishments altogether — and let automation handle it while you focus on actual work.
How to automate your brag doc with Steady
Steady is an operating system for coordination that connects to the tools your team already uses — GitHub, Jira, Linear, Slack, and 20+ more — and automatically synthesizes activity into summaries you can actually use. That includes a personal highlight reel, delivered to your inbox on your schedule.
Here’s how to set it up.
Step 1: Set up Smart Check-ins (2 minutes per day)
Smart Check-ins are Steady’s async daily updates. Each day, Steady prompts you with three questions: what you’re working on next, what you completed, and whether you’re blocked on anything.
The key feature here is AI Quick Fill. Before you type a single word, Steady automatically pulls in activity from all your connected tools — commits merged, tickets closed, PRs reviewed — and drafts a summary for you. You review it, add any context that isn’t captured in the tools (the decision you made in a meeting, the tricky customer conversation), and submit.
The whole thing takes under 2 minutes. And every check-in becomes a timestamped, searchable record of your work.
To get started:
- Connect your tools in Steady’s integrations panel (GitHub, Jira, Linear, and others connect in one click)
- Set your check-in schedule — daily, or whatever cadence works for your team
- When the prompt arrives in Slack or email, click, review the AI-drafted summary, add context, submit
You’re not writing a brag doc yet. You’re just doing a quick daily update. Steady is quietly gathering the raw material for you.
Step 2: Create a Brag Doc Echo (set up once, runs forever)
Echoes are Steady’s AI agents — automated, recurring reports that answer any question about what’s going on at work by pulling from your check-ins and all connected tools. o
You can create an Echo specifically for your personal highlight reel. Here’s the prompt that works well:
Summarize my accomplishments from the past week. Include one paragraph overview, my biggest win, and a list of five major achievements with details.
Set it to run every Friday at 9:30 AM. This shows up in your Daily Digest and Steady can send it to Slack or email.
To set it up:
- Go to Echoes in Steady’s navigation
- Click New Echo
- Enter your prompt (use the example above or customize it)
- Set the schedule: weekly, Fridays
- Choose your delivery channel: Daily Digest, Slack, or email
- Save — and you’re done
From that point forward, every Friday morning you’ll receive a structured summary of your week’s work. You don’t have to stop and remember. Steady assembles it from your check-ins and connected tools.
Step 3: Automatically compile for the quarter
When review season arrives, you’re not starting from scratch. You have 12 weekly highlight reels sitting in your Steady feed.
But you don’t need to manually copy/paste and organize your done work by themes. Steady can do that for you.
Use Echoes to run a prompt like:
Look at my highlights over the last quarter and create a brag doc for me. Organize by themes and call out impact
If your company uses a specific review format — impact statements, goal alignment, peer nomination prompts — you can use a prompt with Echoes to format achievements specifically for that structure. Run it monthly or quarterly, on demand.
How much time does this actually save?
Here’s the honest math.
| Task | Manual approach | With Steady |
|---|---|---|
| Daily activity tracking | 10–20 min/day (or nothing, then scrambling) | ~2 min/day with AI Quick Fill |
| Weekly achievement summary | 30–60 min/week (or skipped) | 0 min — delivered automatically |
| Quarterly brag doc compilation | 2–4 hours per review cycle | ~5 min reviewing |
Over a year, that’s roughly 30–50 hours of documentation work eliminated. Time that goes back into the work itself.
And the quality goes up. Manual brag docs rely on memory and whatever you can find in your inbox. Steady’s version is comprehensive, timestamped, and grounded in actual activity data from your tools.
What this means for your career
There’s a version of this that’s just about saving time. But the bigger benefit is consistency.
Most people write a compelling brag doc once, when they’re gunning for a promotion. The people who make it a habit — who have a continuous, well-documented record of impact — are the ones who can advocate for themselves whenever a new opportunity arises. Not just when review season forces them to.
When your manager asks what you’ve been working on, you have an answer. When a skip-level meeting surfaces unexpectedly, you’re ready. When you’re updating your resume two years from now, the record is there.
The habit is good. The manual work is optional. Steady handles the work; you get the benefit.
Set it up today
Steady’s brag doc automation is part of a broader coordination platform that keeps teams aligned without meetings, chasing updates, or manual documentation. The Echo feature and Smart Check-ins are available on all plans.
Start your free trial at runsteady.com — the setup takes 10 minutes, and your first automated highlight reel arrives Friday.
Frequently asked questions
What is a brag doc? A brag doc (sometimes called a brag book or achievement log) is a running record of your professional accomplishments, impact, and contributions at work. It’s used during performance reviews, promotion conversations, and job searches. Most people don’t maintain them consistently because the manual upkeep is time-consuming.
How often should I update my brag doc? Weekly is the gold standard — close enough to the work that details aren’t lost, far enough to see patterns across the week. The problem is that weekly means 50+ updates per year, which is where most brag doc habits break down. Automating weekly summaries with a tool like Steady makes the weekly cadence effortless.
What should I include in a brag doc? Strong brag docs include: completed projects and features, measurable impact (performance improvements, revenue influenced, users helped), process improvements you drove, mentoring or cross-team contributions, and context about why the work mattered. Steady’s Echo agent pulls activity from connected tools and formats these categories automatically.
Can I use AI to write my brag doc? Yes — but the quality depends on the input. Generic AI tools require you to manually provide context about what you did. Steady’s Echo agent is different because it pulls directly from your actual work activity across GitHub, Jira, Linear, and other tools, plus the context you add in daily check-ins. The result is a summary that reflects what you actually accomplished, not a hallucinated approximation.
How is Steady different from using ChatGPT for my brag doc? ChatGPT requires you to remember, gather, and paste in your own context — which is the hard part. Steady automatically collects activity from your tools, surfaces it in structured check-ins, and synthesizes it into achievement summaries on a recurring schedule. You set it up once; it runs every week without prompting.
Does Steady integrate with GitHub? Yes. Steady integrates with GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, and Bugsnag. Commits, pull requests, and merge requests automatically appear in your activity stream and get factored into your Echo summaries — so your engineering output is represented accurately, not just the work you remembered to write down.
