Why You Should Use Your Work Calendar for Performance Reviews | John's Tips 2024W28
Have you ever struggled to remember what you have achieved over the performance review cycle in question? Here's why you should use your work calendar to jog your memory.
The performance review process can be both tedious and overwhelming for something that can have such a critical impact on your career's future.
That being said, there is one tip I’d like to share with you that really takes a lot of the pain out of the discovery part of it, when you are sitting there wondering
“what have I actually done in the past six months?”
So this tip is simple - use your work calendar to refresh your memory!
Simply scroll back through the weeks and months in your and look at the meetings you were included in.
I’ve been doing this for most of my career, and you’d be suprised how many projects or initiatives you’ve been involved in that you have forgotten about. If thats the case for you, the person who actually did the work - how is your manager going to remember?
For most people, anything that holds any importance in your past year is going to have had a meeting in your calendar. I don’t think I have ever had a project begin without at least one meeting in the calendar to which I was invited.
Once you have jogged your memory and reminded yourself of those projects, then you can take this information to slack/teams/confluence etc. and find out the finer details if you need to, but sometimes the meeting itself is enough to give your brain the kick it needs to remember the important things.
Once you have the full list of work, its a lot easier to cherry pick your best projects to send to your manager.
Can you take this a step further? Of course!
Do you need peer reviews?
If so, you can search your calendar for the email of the peers you need to get feedback from and find all the meetings where you both were involved. Having done this, you can gently direct those peers towards the projects where you worked together, and be specific and mention the ones where you might get more favourable feedback.
Here’s an example of what you might send once you’ve identified the projects you were both on:
I’m looking for some feedback on my work for the past 6 months, and would love to hear your feedback on some of the projects we worked on together, like “Project that made the company a bunch of money A”, “Project I did really well on B” and “Project that we worked well together C”.
Leave out the “Project that failed half way through D”. Nobody needs feedback on that one!
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