Career
The Weekly Wins Log That Wins Your Next Raise
Appraisal season arrives and you cannot remember what you actually did in March. You write vague lines about being a team player while a colleague walks in with numbers.
Human memory is biased towards the last three weeks. Your manager's memory is too. An appraisal is not a memory test, it is a documentation contest, and the person with a record wins it without needing to be louder. This matters more in a market where managers rotate, companies restructure mid-year, and the person assessing you in December may have joined in September with no idea what you salvaged in April.
Record five lines every week: what the situation was, what you did, what changed, and who benefited. Attach a number wherever one exists - naira saved, hours removed, customers retained, errors prevented, days shaved off a process. Where nothing is measurable, name the person or department that gained. Testimony is evidence too, and specific testimony beats a general claim about your work ethic.
The log outlives the appraisal. It becomes your CV, your interview stories, your LinkedIn, and your case when you ask to be moved up a band. It also protects you: when a new manager inherits you, you hand them a record rather than hoping your reputation travelled. Ten minutes a week is the cheapest career insurance available to a salaried person.
In practice
A logistics coordinator in Ikeja kept a Sunday-evening note on her phone for eight months. At appraisal she showed that rerouting deliveries had cut fuel spend by roughly ₦180,000 a month and reduced late drops from about 14 a week to 3, and that she had trained two new dispatch riders during a staffing gap. She asked for a review of her salary band and got it. Her manager also lifted three of her lines directly into his own report to the country director.
Undocumented work is unremembered work.
Action step
Open a note on your phone tonight titled Wins, set a repeating Friday 4pm reminder, and write five lines each week: what you did, what changed, and the number attached to it.