The CV you submit for a grant application is assembled from wherever you stored things. A paper you remember submitting in 2022 but the journal portal shows 2023. A workshop talk you are nearly sure you gave but cannot find confirmation. A grant you applied for three years ago, status forgotten because the notification email is somewhere in a folder you stopped checking.
This is ordinary. Academics do not have a system for tracking their own work history because there is no obvious moment to build one. The CV document grows year by year, maintained by hand, and represents something between a record and a best estimate.
The problem surfaces at the worst times. Annual reviews ask for a list of service activities you gave no thought to recording. A biosketch for an R01 needs exactly five years of funding history in a specific format. A tenure dossier needs every publication with full citation data, every course taught with enrollment numbers, every grant with submission dates and outcomes. None of these deadlines announce themselves far enough in advance to reconstruct the record from scratch comfortably.
There is a category of information that falls through the gaps: invited talks at institutions where you were not paid and never received a confirmation letter. Manuscript reviews you completed for journals. Conference sessions you chaired. Workshop proposals that got rejected. None of these feel important enough to file at the time, but together they describe the scope of your engagement in the field, and promotion committees ask for them.
Submission history is its own problem. If a paper went to three journals, each rejection and revision round is documented across three different editorial systems. Whether you revised in response to an R&R or withdrew and resubmitted elsewhere lives in your email or your memory, not anywhere that updates automatically when a decision comes in.
What you actually want is something that keeps up as you go. Not a document you maintain by hand once a year, but a place where you log a submission when you send it, note a talk when you give it, record a review when you complete it. The log does not need to be elaborate. It just needs to exist consistently, before you need to produce it for someone else.
Vitae is a free macOS app built specifically for this. It tracks papers and their submission history, grants applied for and their status, talks, teaching, and service contributions. Everything stored locally on your Mac, no account needed. The fields map to what promotion committees and funding agencies actually ask for, rather than to generic project management categories that do not quite fit academic work.
The goal is not to make the dossier enjoyable to assemble. The goal is to make the information available when you need it, because you logged it when it happened rather than trying to reconstruct it under pressure.