Natália Spencer

Posted on Jan 5 • Originally published at bragdoc.ai

Stop Setting Goals, Start Tracking Wins

#career #motivation #productivity #developer

Forget New Year's goals—they fail by February. Learn why tracking wins instead is more effective for your career advancement.

It's January 5th. Your inbox is full of emails about "crush your 2026 goals" and LinkedIn is overflowing with goal-setting frameworks. Everyone's talking about OKRs, SMART goals, and accountability partnerships.

And here's the thing: almost none of it will work. Your goals will be forgotten by February. Life will happen. Motivation will fade. You'll be right back where you started.

So let's stop pretending that goal-setting is the answer. It's not. There's something far more effective—and way simpler.

Why Goals Fail (And It's Not Your Fault)

Goal-setting sounds perfect in theory. You identify what you want. You make it specific and measurable. You track progress. You crush it.

Except you don't.

The research is brutal. Studies show that 92% of New Year's resolutions fail by mid-February. And it's not because people lack discipline. It's because goals are fundamentally misaligned with how humans actually work.

Goals are abstract. You set "improve my technical leadership" and then what? How do you know if you're making progress? The target is too vague, too far away, too dependent on circumstances outside your control.

Motivation evaporates. That motivational rush on January 1st gets crushed by the reality of January 5th. When your goal is "get better at system design" and you're stuck debugging a production issue at 3 AM, the goal feels irrelevant. Life always wins.

Goals ignore compounding. You set a goal, fail to hit it, and feel like a failure. But you're missing something crucial: the small wins you did achieve still count. They compound. You just didn't notice them because they weren't on your goal list.

Most goals don't matter for your career anyway. Your manager doesn't care about your personal goals during performance review season. They care about what you actually accomplished. What you shipped. What problems you solved. What impact you created.

If your goal was "improve code quality" but you shipped a feature that doubled user engagement, your goal becomes irrelevant. But that accomplishment? That's permanent ammunition for your career.

The Alternative: Track Your Wins Instead

Here's what actually works: stop setting goals. Start tracking wins.

A "win" is any achievement, no matter how small. Shipped a feature. Fixed a critical bug. Mentored a junior engineer. Improved build times. Documented a complex system. Unblocked a team. Solved a thorny problem.

The magic of tracking wins is that it's reactive, not predictive. You're not guessing about what you'll accomplish. You're documenting what you actually did. No motivation required. No willpower required. You just show up, do your job, and write down what happened.

Think about what happens across your year:

You ship 5-10 significant features
You fix 20+ bugs, some important
You review 100+ PRs
You help teammates solve problems
You attend meetings that matter
You make architectural decisions
You respond to incidents
You mentor junior engineers
You improve tooling and infrastructure

That's probably 50-100 meaningful contributions across 12 months. That's more than enough.

But here's the problem: you won't remember them. Your brain is designed to move on to the next problem. In six months, you won't remember what you shipped in January. In nine months, you'll forget which features you built versus which your teammates built.

That's why tracking wins matters. You're creating a permanent record of what you actually accomplished.

Why Tracking Wins Works (And Why Goals Don't)

Goals are about the future. Wins are about the present. And the present is all you can actually control.

When you track wins, you're not fighting motivation. You're just documenting reality. Did I ship something today? Write it down. Did I fix something important? Write it down. Did I help someone? Write it down.

No willpower required. No motivation required. Just honesty.

Wins compound in ways goals don't. You don't set a goal to "have 50 achievements this year." You just document them. By March, you've accumulated 15. By July, 40. By December, you've got a comprehensive record of what you actually contributed.

Wins are currency for the moments that matter. Performance reviews? You've got 50 concrete examples. Salary negotiation? You can point to specific wins and their impact. Job interview? You've got detailed stories ready. Promotion conversation? You've got proof.

Wins don't require perfection. A goal asks: did I hit my target? Win tracking asks: did I do something that mattered? Those are different questions. The second one is actually answerable.

How This Connects to Your Brag Doc

A brag doc is simply a running list of your wins. Nothing fancy. No perfect grammar. No elaborate structure.

You might organize them by quarter, by project, by impact type. Or you might just make it a chronological dump. The organization doesn't matter. The wins themselves do.

When you prepare for your Q1 performance review, you don't scramble to remember what you did. You open your brag doc and you've got it all right there.

When you're interviewing for a new role, you don't stumble through vague descriptions. You've got detailed examples of your impact, including metrics and context.

When you discuss career growth with your manager, you come with evidence, not hopes. That shifts the entire conversation.

This is why brag documents matter. They're not about bragging. They're about remembering. They're the difference between underselling your work and being paid what you're actually worth.

The Easiest Way to Start

The hardest part of tracking wins is remembering to do it. You ship something, move on to the next problem, and forget to write it down.

That's why BragDoc exists. It automatically extracts achievements from your Git history, so you don't have to remember what you shipped. Your commits and code reviews become documented wins without you lifting a finger.

You focus on the work. We handle the documentation.

By the end of March, you'll have 30-50 concrete wins documented automatically. By the end of the year, you'll have 100+. And every single one of them will be ammunition for your career.

Or Do It Manually

Prefer to do it yourself? That works too. You just need five minutes and one document.

Create a Google Doc, Notion page, or Markdown file. Call it "2026 Wins" or literally anything. Add 3-5 recent wins from the last month. Then every Friday, jot down what happened. One line per win. Two sentences max.

"Shipped new logging infrastructure that reduces debugging time by 30%"
"Fixed race condition in payment processing that was causing 2% of transactions to fail"
"Mentored Alex through their first production feature deployment"
"Led architecture discussion that unblocked the mobile team"

That's a brag doc. Not fancy. Not complicated. Just honest.

Skip the Goals. Track the Wins.

Here's what I'd do if I were you: don't set any New Year's goals. Instead, create a brag doc today. Add three wins from the last month. Then every Friday, add one or two more.

By March, when everyone else is abandoning their goals, you'll have a comprehensive record of what you actually accomplished. And that's infinitely more valuable than a list of intentions that never happened.

Your career depends on the wins you document, not the goals you set.

So skip the goals. Track the wins.