When I was in my early twenties living in Los Angeles (in the Valley technically), I created a document that has saved my butt several times and that has proven to be the most useful thing I ever created. This document was created in 2006. Before you continue, please guess in the comments what this document contains.

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Okay. The document I’ve been using for twenty years is a record of my job info. It includes all my former addresses with dates (because some places used to ask for that—not sure if they still do), all of the details about my education like scores, GPAs, honors and awards, etc., details for the references I’ve had over the years, and a record of each of my jobs with all of the detail I’d need to include in a job application or resume.

There isn’t a single other document that I’ve come back to every few years the way I do this document. It has been transferred from Word to Open Doc to Google Docs to Libre Office. I just spent most of the day cleaning it up because it’s been awhile since I updated it and there were several copies as a result of so many transfers. I’ve changed my address a LOT so the address portion is particularly useful for when I have to remember them to confirm my identity for my credit or something.

The reason I first put the document together was because I was filling out a lot of paper and online applications for places like Starbucks, movie theaters, restaurants, Blockbuster (!!) and such and a lot of them were requesting my previous addresses and previous application dates and I was like how tf am I supposed to remember all that? My solution was the document. And it has been really valuable!

I’m still applying to jobs in 2026 where the information in the document has been useful. I don’t know if it will be as useful to those of you who are currently entering the job market, but I’d recommended it, even if only to document things for your own memory. There are places I’ve lived and worked that I can’t recall the details of until I look at this document. There’s something about it and the different times I’ve come back to update it that makes my memories of those eras so much more accessible.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not always good at keeping up with updates. I’ve been working on it all day today because I only made the most barebones updates when I left UVU. The longer you wait to update it, the more work you have to do to uncover the details you need for applications and to remember details like what you were responsible for and what your duties were and what EXACT DAY you started and left because some places will ask for that even if you give them a resume. That’s one very annoying thing that hasn’t changed in the last 20 years.

If you can be more disciplined than me, I would advise setting yourself a weekly or monthly schedule and including a section for each job where you can keep notes on things you’ve accomplished, projects you’ve been involved in, trainings or continuing education you’ve taken, kudos you’ve received, etc. etc. Anything that quickly escapes your memory after a few weeks of getting railroaded by the day-to-day. The more information you have, the better prepared you are to tailor your resume for a variety of positions based on things you’ve done that can be transferred. Until recently, identifying my accomplishments has been one of the hardest parts of creating a resume for me. When I worked at places like the Universal parking lot and Jamba Juice, finding advice that was actually useful for crafting my resume was impossible. All of the advice was for people in mid-level to senior office job type careers. It’s easy to include quantifiable achievements when you’re working with money or social media and you can say things like “saved X$ by doing Y”. But when you’re working at Starbucks or as a receptionist it’s not that simple. I won’t go into that here though.

My point is, this info is helpful to record and keep track of! I’m including a Google doc you can create a copy of if you’d like to start your own—you can also copy paste the text into something like Notion or GoodNotes or Evernote if you prefer those! The Google doc is set up to use the document hierarchy so you can get an overview—that may or may not translate when copy pasting.