The 60-Minute Self Assessment

It’s performance review time at Duolingo! The best thing about performance review time is how productive I am because I’m trying to procrastinate from working on my self-assessment.1

This year, there’s been some murmuring in the hallways after we received guidance that it should take us no longer than 90 minutes to complete our self-assessments. I’ve had a couple of conversations now with people who say they regularly take longer than that to craft their performance reviews. Following the advice to “write what you repeat,” here’s why I spend even less time working on my performance review — one hour of writing time, tops.

First, here’s how I keep my self-assessment in perspective. I try to remember:

1. It’s the work that matters, not the written review. Coming from college, this was a hard thing to unlearn. In most of my classes, the papers I turned in were the things that earned me my grades. Work isn’t like that! I know my performance review won’t hinge on how well-crafted my writing is in my performance review. What matters is how good I’ve been at my job for the past six months.

2. My self assessment has an audience of one: My manager. It has one job: Remind her of the full breadth of what I’ve worked on and why it was important. Every time I sit down to work on my performance review, I start with looking through the paper trail that’s naturally left as part of my job: Specs, code changes, etc. I always find something where I realize, “Oh yeah! That thing happened during this review period too!” If it’s hard for me to remember everything I’ve done, I know it’s impossible for my manager to effortlessly do that for her entire team. The job of the performance review is provide my manager with a simple, short cheat sheet she can use to remind herself of what I’ve worked on.

3. The key word in the point above: “remind.” I’m not having to explain what I’ve worked on. My manager and I have been meeting regularly throughout the review period. Nothing I’m going to write about will be new information for her. I’m just providing an easy way for her to remember the things she already knows about what I’ve been doing.

Now in spite of loving to write, I’m not a particularly fast writer. Here are two things I do to keep to my self-imposed limit of one hour of writing time.

1. A few days before the review deadline, I go through my paper trail and make some notes. I don’t count this as “writing time.” I’m just gathering information. I build a simple list of all the different things I’ve worked on. Then I let that list percolate in my subconscious until:

2. One hour before the review deadline, I start writing my review. I’ve already done my research. I’ve got my list of things I’ve worked on. What I need to do is defeat my tendency to endlessly rewrite, to obsess about word choice, and to get distracted by random things on the Internet instead of committing words to paper. The pressure of the impending deadline brings focus, and I can’t spend more than an hour on my review because I only have an hour. Foolproof!

Note all of these tips apply only to writing my own review. I’m also a manager. Working on written feedback for the members of team I support is an entirely different beast. While I hope that nothing that I write will be a surprise, I don’t want to just dash off quick bullet points to remind people of feedback conversations we’ve had in the past. It feels disrespectful. So in this case, I’ll let myself obsess about wording; I’ll write and rewrite; I’ll do my best to provide a document that is worthy of the effort that my teammate put in over the review period. I’ll stress over the reviews I write for others. But for my own review? I’m relaxed.