Why Your Intern Tracks Their Work Better Than You (And How To Catch Up)

12/4/2025• ViaSkill Team• Career Development, Performance Reviews, Gen Z, Managers, Brag Documents

You walk into your performance review feeling cautiously proud.
It has been a busy year. You kept things moving. You solved problems no one else could see.

Then your intern opens a spotless Notion page with every project, outcome, and skill neatly laid out.

You glance down at your mostly empty self-evaluation and think:

“How do they have a better record of their work than I do?”

If that hits a nerve, you are extremely not alone.

Younger professionals—especially Gen Z—live inside digital tools. Task managers, collaboration platforms, and AI helpers are simply part of how they think and plan. At the same time, surveys show they feel intense pressure about their future and finances. Put those together and you get a familiar pattern:

They Feel anxious about their career trajectory.
They Reach for tools that give them more control and visibility.
They Build surprisingly detailed records of what they do, very early on.

Meanwhile, many mid-career and senior people quietly carry a decade or more of impact with almost no written trace of it.

This article will walk through:

Why Younger colleagues often document their work better
Why More experienced professionals fall behind
What This means if you manage others
A Simple system to catch up (with or without tools)
How To Turn this into a win for your whole team using ViaSkill

The goal is not to shame you for “being behind.” It is to give you a humane way to stop letting your work disappear.

1. Why Younger Professionals Often Have Better Records

1.1 Digital Organization Is Their Default

If you grew up with paper planners and email, digital tools might still feel like “extra.”

For many Gen Z professionals, apps are the default notebook. A phone note or workspace in Notion feels as natural as a physical journal once did. Studies of student and early-career behavior show very high adoption of productivity apps, shared workspaces, and AI-powered study helpers in this group.

So when an intern casually maintains:

A Running list of projects
Action Items from each week
Short Reflections after big tasks

it does not feel like “bragging” to them. It is simply how they use their tools to stay sane.

1.2 Anxiety About The Future Pushes Them To Keep Proof

Gen Z and younger millennials consistently report high levels of stress about work, money, and long-term security. Burnout research also shows they are quicker to consider changing jobs when stress and workload feel unsustainable.

If your work situation feels fragile, it is natural to want evidence:

In Case you need to apply elsewhere
In Case you need to argue for a raise or promotion
In Case you just need to prove to yourself that you are not stuck

That is all a work log or “brag document” really is: an evidence file for Future You.

Advice about brag documents—running lists of your accomplishments and contributions—has spread widely in tech and professional communities. A lot of younger workers start one early, which gives them a huge advantage when review or interview season hits.

2. Why More Experienced Professionals Fall Behind

If you have been working for ten or twenty years without any kind of brag document, it does not mean you are less serious or less driven. It usually means you were trained in a different environment.

2.1 You Were Told To “Just Do The Work”

Many of us grew up with messages like:

“Keep Your head down.”
“If You work hard, people will notice.”

There was less emphasis on:

Tracking Your own impact
Keeping Notes for future reviews
Advocating For yourself with data

So you focused on delivery. On putting out fires. On supporting the team. Writing things down about your own contribution felt, at best, optional—and at worst, self-promotional.

2.2 Recency Bias Hits Harder As Your Career Gets Longer

Recency bias is the tendency to over-weight what happened most recently when making judgments.

In performance reviews, this means managers often:

Remember The last sprint, not the last year
Overemphasize Recent wins (or stumbles)
Underestimate Quiet, steady progress

The same bias hits you, too. Without notes, an entire year of effort gets compressed into whatever happened in the last few weeks.

Researchers and practitioners who study performance reviews often recommend that employees keep a brief weekly work journal to counteract this—because if you do not remember the important things you did, your manager has no chance.

2.3 Your Work Is Messier And Less Visible

Early in your career, it is easy to point to:

A Feature you shipped
A Report you wrote
An Event you ran

Later, your role may look more like:

Aligning Multiple teams
Making Trade-offs between competing goals
Mentoring Colleagues and smoothing conflicts
Quietly Preventing problems before they explode

All of those are valuable. They are also hard to capture in a single screenshot or line item unless you intentionally write them down.

Without a lightweight habit of documenting them, they fade.

3. Why Managers Need Their Own Records Too

If you lead people, this is not just about your own promotion case. It is also about fairness.

3.1 Memory Alone Is Not A Fair System

When managers rely purely on memory, performance reviews tend to favor:

People Who talk about their work frequently
People Who had recent “big” wins
People Whose work is naturally more visible

Guides on fair performance reviews repeatedly point to recency bias as a major problem and recommend shared notes, check-ins, and simple logs to avoid it.

If one report shows up with a detailed list of accomplishments and another shows up saying “I don’t really know what to put,” it is easy to unconsciously assume the first is “more driven” or “more impactful”—even if that is not the full story.

Your own records help balance this out.

3.2 You Are The Model For How Work Should Be Treated

When you:

Keep A record of your own work
Encourage Your team to do the same
Use Those notes when giving feedback or writing reviews

you send a clear message:

“Your Efforts matter.”
“We Will not forget what you did six months ago.”
“We Are basing decisions on evidence, not just vibes.”

For younger workers who already feel anxious about how they will be evaluated, this can be grounding and humane.

4. A Simple System To Catch Up

You do not need a perfect app. You need a system that is simple enough that you will actually use it.

You can do this with:

A Document called “Accomplishments 2026”
A Spreadsheet with columns for Date, Project, Result, Skills
A Notes App page
A Structured space inside a tool like ViaSkill

4.1 Pick One Home For Your Notes

The exact tool matters far less than having one consistent place.

If you use ViaSkill, your “home” can be the Project & Skill Tracker. Each project or task becomes an entry you can reuse later in the Resume Generator and Portfolio Builder.

If you prefer to start elsewhere, great—just commit to a single location.

4.2 Use A Clear, Repeatable Format

For each entry, capture:

What You did
Why It mattered
Who Was involved or affected
What Changed as a result
What Strengths or skills it demonstrates

Example:

“Led A cross-team effort to simplify onboarding for new hires. Partnered with HR and senior developers to create a standard checklist and starter tasks. Reduced ramp-up time from six weeks to four and improved new-hire survey scores. Demonstrated leadership, process design, and communication.”

In ViaSkill, that might look like:

A Project Title (e.g., “New Hire Onboarding Revamp”)
A Short Description of the situation and result
Skill Tags like Leadership, Process Design, Stakeholder Communication

Now it is no longer a fuzzy memory. It is a reusable story for reviews, interviews, and applications.

4.3 Set A Recurring Time To Update It

Pick a rhythm that feels realistic:

Fifteen Minutes every two weeks
Ten Minutes at the end of each month

Look at your calendar and ask:

“What Did I ship or meaningfully advance?”
“Where Did I help someone else succeed?”
“What Did I learn or handle that was new?”

Career advice around brag documents is unanimous here: small, regular updates beat “panic-writing a whole year in one night” every time.

If you prefer a more guided starting point, you can also use Skill Snapshot:

Paste In a task you did
Let ViaSkill infer the skills and roles
Save The result into your Project & Skill Tracker once you create an account

It is an easy way to begin building your record without staring at a blank page.

5. Turning This Into A Win For Your Whole Team

Instead of feeling threatened that your intern has receipts and you do not, you can make this a team advantage.

5.1 Ask Juniors To Bring Two Or Three Entries To 1:1s

Encourage earlier-career teammates to:

Keep Their own accomplishment list
Bring Two or three items to each one-to-one meeting

This helps them practice talking about their work and gives you richer, more specific data to respond to. When those entries live in ViaSkill, you can both see:

Which Skills they are using most
Where They want more opportunities
How Their work is evolving over time

5.2 Normalize “Brag Documents” For Everyone

You can:

Share A simple template or example entry
Explain That this is for their benefit, not surveillance
Mention That you keep one yourself

When leaders do this, documenting your work stops being a “special project for overachievers” and starts being a basic professional habit.

ViaSkill can act as the shared, structured version of this: one place where people log projects, see inferred skills, and reuse that data for resumes and portfolios—without having to build complex Notion setups from scratch.

5.3 Keep It Humane

Given how high stress levels already are (especially for younger workers), your goal is not to create yet another scoreboard.

Encourage people to record:

A Few meaningful items each month
Moments That felt like growth
Contributions That might otherwise be forgotten

Quality is more important than volume. The goal is clarity and support, not perfection.

6. Bringing It All Together

If it feels like your intern has a sharper record of their work than you do, it probably means:

They Grew up with tools that make documentation effortless.
They Feel pressure about their future and want proof of progress.
You Have been doing valuable, complex work without a light, repeatable way to capture it.

You can change that starting this week.

Pick One home for your notes.
Use A simple format: what you did, why it mattered, who was involved, what changed, what it shows about you.
Update It on a schedule that feels doable.
Invite Your team to do the same.

Over time, you will build a record that supports:

Fairer Performance reviews
Stronger Promotion cases
More Confident job searches
A Kinder, more accurate relationship with your own career story

If you want help, that is exactly what ViaSkill is for.

You can:

Use Skill Snapshot to turn one task into skills, roles, and ready-made talking points—even without an account.
Save Your entries into the Project & Skill Tracker once you sign up, so they can power your Resume Generator and Portfolio Builder inside ViaSkill.

Your intern may have started earlier.
Your experience is still a huge advantage.

Now it deserves a system that remembers as much as you do.

📚 References

Cecchi Dimeglio, P. (2022, July 12). 6 ways to make performance reviews more fair. Harvard Business Review.
Culture Amp. (2021, June 23). Types of performance review biases and how to avoid them. Culture Amp.
Delta Analytics. (2025, October 7). Gen Z’s productivity app revolution.
Deloitte. (2024, June 3). 2024 Gen Z and millennial survey. Deloitte Insights.
Engagedly. (2025, August). How does recency bias affect performance reviews? Engagedly Blog.
Evans, J. (2019, June 28). Get your work recognized: Write a brag document. jvns.ca.
Kroon, C. (2024, April 2). Why I keep a brag document and how it can help you.
Talker Research. (2025, April 28). Three quarters of Gen Z is looking to switch jobs for this reason. New York Post.
The Fountain Institute. (2025, January 26). Keeping track of your accomplishments with a brag document.
The Wall Street Journal. (2022, August 18). How to use Notion, the do-it-yourself productivity app embraced by Gen Z.
University of Arizona Housing. (2025, August 9). Brag sheet example: Showcasing success with style.
Women Who Code. (2023, September 10). Brag documents and why you should have one.