You will leave your job with nothing to show

The average person changes employers every few years and every single time they walk out of a building leaving behind everything they made in it.

It was never in a place that was yours.

The decks are on their drive. The campaign is on their site. The numbers are in a dashboard you lose access to at 6.01pm on your last day, and the email thread proving it was your idea is in an inbox that gets deactivated.

All you keep is a job title and the hope that someone remembers all you did.

Why this is worse than it used to be

Two things changed at once.

People move more often, so the loss happens repeatedly rather than once at the end of a career. And references stopped meaning much, because the person who managed you has usually also left, and most companies now confirm dates and title and nothing else.

So the two systems that used to carry your evidence, the company and the reference, have both stopped being a thing and nothing has yet to replace them. And so you need to capture everything you do, in situ.

Capture is boring and it is the whole thing

The habit is unglamorous. Once a week, ten minutes, save three things.

The artefact. A screenshot, the file, the link. Whatever the thing itself was that you did.

The number, before and after. This is the one everyone skips and it is the one that matters. Not "improved the onboarding flow." The completion rate on the day you started and the completion rate six weeks later.

Who saw it. The client, your team, the person who signed it off. Not for name dropping, because in two years you probably won't remember.

Put it all in one folder with dates. Drop it into Notion.

Then the prompt

Capture on its own gives you a folder of screenshots you never look at. The last step turns it into something usable, and it has to run in two passes. I use Claude for this because it reads screenshots and follows the instruction not to fill gaps, which is the part that matters most.

The first pass extracts and marks what is missing. Do not let it write anything yet.

> I am going to give you raw material from something I worked on. Screenshots, notes, numbers, messages.

>

> Extract exactly four things and nothing else:

>

> 1. What I actually did, in one sentence, using only what is in the material.

> 2. What changed as a result, with the specific number if it is here.

> 3. What I can prove from this material, listing which piece proves what.

> 4. What is missing. Be specific about the gap, for example "there is a screenshot of the finished page but no before state" or "there is an outcome claimed in a message but no data behind it."

>

> Do not fill any gap with a plausible guess. Do not describe anything that is not in the material. If a number is not here, say it is not here.

>

> Here is the material:

The fourth answer is the useful one. It tells you what you failed to save, and it will be the same gap every time until you fix the habit.

Second pass, once you have looked at the gaps.

> Using only what you extracted, and nothing you inferred, write three versions:

>

> A one line CV bullet, action then outcome, with the real number.

> A two sentence version for a LinkedIn About or a portfolio.

> A short post describing what I did and what happened, written plainly, no adjectives, no "excited to share."

>

> If a version would need a number I do not have, write it without and tell me which one it needed.

The uncomfortable bit

You have to do this while you still have access. It is the same shape as everything else that only pays off later. Cheap now, impossible later.