In all my years in the paycheck workforce, I have never known a woman to fully describe, never mind get credit for, all the work she actually does, and in fact most men don’t either.  It’s easy to see why: we’re all busy, and by the time it comes to write all down in a review, we forget a lot of it.  The way to remember it, unsurprisingly, is to write it down: learn what you do, a (free download!) tool that will help you do that.

This tool takes about ten minutes a day, every workday for a month, plus the time performance management takes, where most people perform certain tasks they only do at that time of year (self-evaluations, peer evaluations, and so on).

1. Put a task reminder on your calendar at the end of every workday for a month, and for the duration of your performance-review period.
2. With your calendar open, write down every discrete tasks you did that day: not the generic “attended meeting” but “attended product design review” or “attended digital marketing planning meeting.”
3. Every time the task recurs, count it again.
4. You should repeat this process once a year, and compare your results to the previous year’s.

You should now be in a position to know the following:

1. What you do
2. What you do too much of (could you delegate?)
3. What you do too little of (learning a new skill?)
4. What data to show your boss (if I do less of this, I could do more of that task you value)