Struggling to remember all your achievements during appraisals? This simple weekly habit can change everything!

✨ Weekly Retrospectives: A Game-Changer for Your Appraisals!

It’s tough to recollect everything to write your appraisal packet once a year. It is equally challenging for your manager to remember everything you did. This often leads to recency bias in the review.

🔄 Enter Weekly Retrospectives!

Write a weekly retrospective to capture all the details of your work. Use the situation behavior impact model to structure your points. Capture your work: PRs you made, bugs you solved, and incidents you resolved etc. For example: While developing feature X, I cleaned up the code for better readability.

📚 Learn and Grow:

Capture what you learned this week and what you look forward to learning in the coming week. Reflect on your struggles or inefficiencies and determine if you can improve. Discuss these with your manager in the next 1-1. For example, you spent a lot of time setting up the environment to reproduce a bug and figuring out if you could automate it.

📩 Share it with your manager:

Share this weekly retrospective with your manager. It can be a shared document or a private channel in Slack. I am confident that your manager would love to get updates from you. Once you get into the habit of reflecting, you can do it twice or thrice a week instead of over the weekend.

🏆 Write a monthly brag document

Julia Evans has introduced this concept of Brag document. It’s a fantastic way to capture all your achievements. Create a brag document that you update at least monthly using your weekly retrospective updates. Share this with your manager.

📝 Make the brag document wholistic.

You can create a brag document for every project as part of your project retrospective. Include work you did as part of the project, collaboration & mentoring activities, company-building activities like hiring, organizing hackathons, your learnings, talks you delivered, blog posts, etc.

Start today! You can find a detailed template here.