How to improve your chances for raises and bonuses

If you're lucky, you have a boss who notices all of the good things you do throughout the year. Unfortunately during annual evaluation, many bosses are doing good if they can remember at least a few of your accomplishments. It's not because they don't care, it's because they're trying to keep up with their own responsibilities.

So how can you help out here?

Keep track of your accomplishments throughout the year. In Excel or Word, simply enter the date and a short description of each accomplishment . For example: "10/1/08 - Found new vendor for printing, which will save us $5,000 a year." Or "10/15/08 - Trained coworkers on shortcuts for entering data, which reduced the amount of time from 2 minutes to 1 minute per transaction." Strive for accomplishments above and beyond your job description.

Then about a month to two weeks before your annual evaluation, send your boss your list of accomplishments with a message like "Dear Boss, I realize my evaluation is coming up and thought this may help make the process easier."