The Power of Lists for Professional Success
I love lists. Keeping good lists is one of my secret professional superpowers. In this post, I detail seven specific, easy-to-keep lists which have made the most difference my career. But first, some context.
When I was new to Google in 2015 and really struggling to ramp up, I started keeping a list of little wins. I felt useless and adding to this list of micro-successes helped me feel like I was doing something. Over time, the list helped me see and justify the progress I had made.
Since then I’ve kept dozens of running lists, and the good ones have been instrumental in my professional success. I’ve used lists to get promoted, decide to switch job roles (from engineering to product), and build my career around work I find energizing and meaningful.
The power of documenting related things in one place is that it lets me notice larger patterns and tell a cohesive story about them later. Any individual entry might seem inconsequential, but the aggregate of entries over time becomes incredibly valuable.
So here are the most powerful lists I keep for work:
Artifacts
The longest-running and most useful list I keep is a spreadsheet of every meaningful work contribution I’ve made. (It started as that list of micro-successes.) I add to it multiple times a week and have used it to write my self-assessment every review cycle, as well as to write new versions of my resume and LinkedIn experience entries.
My artifact sheet includes…
- Substantial documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks I created
- Groups of related code changes I committed (back when I was an engineer)
- Major presentations I gave
- Features and articles that landed publicly (like these)
- Anything else that was hard and useful
To make it easy to create one of these for yourself, here are the four columns in this spreadsheet:
Date | Context | Collaborators | Links
Links are the actual artifacts, but just listing the links isn’t all that useful. The meat is in the Context column. which explains why the artifact was important, difficult, or impactful. I can point to a slide deck as evidence that I did good work, but it’s way more powerful if I can say “this deck convinced VP Anna to change her mind on X” or “this characterized a problem that multiple teams were having but no one had named” or “the engineering team now does Y differently because of this.”
Noting down Collaborators is useful when I need to request feedback on the work during review season. It’s not hard to remember who I typically work with, but having the artifact list makes it easy for me to assemble a list of things we worked on together. Coworker Steve would probably write me a nice review if I just asked for feedback, but he’s way more likely to write a compelling review if I can give him a list of five things we worked on together and why they matter.
If you want to start just one list, Artifacts is the one.
Priorities
When I’m feeling frazzled at work, it’s often because I’m trying to work on too many things at once. I feel like I need to be doing everything, so I can’t focus on anything. One way to break out of this is to write down and prioritize the tasks.
Once I’ve written them down, I’m not worried about forgetting them or missing a deadline. Then I can focus on the most important one. (Or at least be wildly productive on the second most important one, fueled by procrastinating about the first one 😉.)
My current priorities document has the following sections: Urgent, Important, and Back Burner. Very simple.
I’ve found this list to be useful not just for myself but also for communicating with my manager. When she asks me to do something new, if I can’t get to it right away, I’ll add it to my list of priorities. Then I tag her to get confirmation that she agrees with the stack rank. This process is especially useful for requests that aren’t actually that important. It’s easy to feel like the most recent request is the most urgent, but often that’s not the case. By adding the request to my list, I show that I have acknowledged it and we can agree that I can just continue focusing on the work that matters most.
Meeting notes
Pre-COVID, I didn’t have a good system for taking meeting notes. A lot of my meetings were in person and it felt rude to take notes on a laptop. Now most of my meetings are virtual. (I come to the office every day, but my current teams are very distributed.) I set up my laptop with the video call on one half of the screen and my notes document on the other. I can take notes while keeping my gaze toward the camera, so people in the meeting feel that I am paying attention.
Most of my recurring team meetings have their own meeting documents. This is good for keeping continuity of the group conversation and sharing notes to people who missed the meeting, but it also has some drawbacks. I find it fiddly to find and open a separate document for each meeting, and lots of my meetings are related. For example, I might get an idea in one meeting, run it by my tech lead in the afternoon, and get sign-off from my manager on it the next day. It’s hard to track arcs like these if the notes are split across documents.
So I have one mega document for all my meeting notes. If a meeting has its own notes document, I just link to it. The structure is simple: Notes for a particular meeting go under a level 2 heading with the names of all the attendees. Each day’s meetings go under a level 1 heading with the day’s date. Dates are listed in reverse chronological order, so I’m always adding to the top of the document (so I don’t need to scroll). Using headings makes it super easy to skim the document using the table of contents.
This system is…
- Good for capturing conversation arcs
- Easily searchable
- Keeps all my little action items in one place
- Lets me take private notes that wouldn’t be appropriate for a shared document
These private notes are things like “Sam is going to Spain. Next week, remember to ask how her vacation went” or “The new plan is to do Y, so X probably isn’t important anymore, but leads haven’t told the team yet” or “He’s great to work with. Definitely want to collaborate more.” Keeping these sorts of notes helps build a relationships and business savvy in ways that are more nuanced than could be captured in any shared documents.
When projects have gone sideways, these meeting notes have been very helpful. Instead of complaining to my manager that Dave is so flaky, I can calmly say “I raised this unresolved issue with Dave back on June 11th.” When a lead was unhappy with how a project was executed, I was able to remind her gently of the date and context where she had in fact signed off on the exact project plan.
One final benefit is that writing meeting notes helps me stay more focused on the current conversation. While some meeting participants are checking their notifications, I try to practice active listening and keep my brain engaged by writing.
Feedback
A running list I update less often, but which is incredibly meaningful, is a document of positive feedback I’ve received. Every review cycle, and whenever I receive a particularly nice message, I’ll copy over the most salient quotes and who wrote them. Not only does the document give me the warm fuzzies, it also gives me clarity and confidence to describe the value I bring.
Quotes give credibility. If I say “I’m a good team player”, it’s a bit vague and I need the confidence and credibility to convince you myself. It’s much easier and more powerful for me to quote an Engineering Director who wrote “Lisie also brings an indefatigable positivity: discussing even the most challenging situations with her becomes a constructive, forward-looking exercise.”
When a colleague has written particularly strong feedback, sometimes I’ll ask them to post it on LinkedIn. Getting the feedback on LinkedIn makes it easily shareable and attributable. Like with the artifacts list, having a feedback list handy means I can make it easy for them to write something specific: “Could you write me a recommendation? For reference, here are four paragraphs you’ve written about me in the past.” Not everyone I have asked has actually done it, but no one has ever minded me asking.
Audits
Much of my job involves coming up with strategies, plans, and decisions. These are all “What should we do?” questions. When I’m stuck on how to answer, often it’s easier to start with “What do we know?” An audit is just an organized list of things we know.
The individual items in the audit often feel pointlessly obvious. But organizing the list and distilling themes always gives clues for what needs to be done. When coming up with a strategy, I’ll often do multiple audits, covering existing features, user research, competitive products, and more.
Recently I also started a document for insights distilled from a product’s usage data (like what percent of users used feature X last week). Like with any audit, at the beginning the exercise felt a bit silly. The some of the data was already in dashboards that anyone on the team could check. But organizing the data in one place focused my thinking, which led me to probe deeper. From there, I discovered surprising patterns which have totally changed how my team thinks about our users.
Challenges
My newest type of list is for challenges. Any project is going to have a number of setbacks and surprises which cause the project to take longer than anticipated. In the past, I wouldn’t try to document the challenges until review season or until something was really blocked. So now I’m working to list issues proactively.
(One important note is to keep the document objective, blameless, and constructive. It’s not worth creating enemies, and usually problems are fundamentally systems issues anyway.)
My hope is this list of challenges will help my team…
- Characterize recurring issues so we can escalate to leadership early
- Help other teams learn from our experiences
- Justify the difficulty of our work to help team members get promoted
- Improve our ability to anticipate challenges so we can plan better in the future
Also, the saga of a project’s setbacks always makes for an engaging presentation, so it’s a good way to increase the visibility of your work and show your team as heroes prevailing in the end.
Things I get excited about
This last list is the shortest and the one I update least frequently, but which is the most important to my high-level trajectory and most quintessentially me. This is the list of things that excite me and make me feel alive.
Cliches like “Do what you love,” “Follow your passion,” or “Listen to your heart” often felt hard for me to answer. So instead, I started a list of things that make me feel alive. Whenever I noticed myself feeling alive and energized— a sensation I feel in my posture, breath, and speech — I’d add whatever I had been doing to the list.
I distilled this into a concrete list of attributes that I know make a job a good match for how I want to spend my time and the ways I want to grow. For me, these include…
- Skills: presenting, mentoring / managing / motivating people, talking about values, understanding users, writing / storytelling, strategy, organizing ideas and information
- Environment: having executive visibility and responsibility to deliver (not extreme stress, but enough pressure to feel my work matters), 1:1 conversations with people I admire
- Domains: user-facing products involving self-expression, inclusion, climate, and AI
This list has helped me identify which roles to apply for when I’ve been looking to switch teams, helped my manager understand what kinds of work to carve out for me, and helped me articulate longer-term goals for my future.
So now we have a list of lists! Each type of list seemed too inconsequential to write about individually, but as a group they show the remarkable power of the practice of documenting related things in one place.
If you have lists that you’ve found helpful in your professional journey, send me a message. I’d love to hear about them.
