Sigh. For many, it’s performance review season. It’s been an interesting year, to say the least, working in tech, but performance review season brings its own workload, procrastination and stress. While I was at Facebook a few years back, I wrote down a few reminders I kept sharing to make writing a self-review more manageable. (Facebook’s review cycle is notoriously intense.)
This week I refreshed that post and added a new section on using AI. If you’re in performance review season, consider this a guide to making your self-review simpler and stronger. If you know someone else who could use it, please share.
How to write a strong self-review and stay sane
During performance reviews at Facebook, we sometimes discussed someone’s work with 80 words on a very large screen. No pressure.
About this time last year, I read Cal Newport’s 2024 book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. Worth a read. We’re living in an informational blizzard. Slack. Emails. AI mania.
Newport’s main idea is simple and uncomfortable: modern work rewards visible activity more than progress – and those two things are often very different. I’ve found if I can slow down even a little bit, get clearer, and focus on the highest-value things, I can make good things happen. If you don’t have time to read the full book, I highlight three of its most memorable stories in the post below: John McPhee, Les Moonves, and Anthony Zuiker.
Why Doing Less Produces Better Work
Modern work rewards speed and visibility. But valuable creative work is slower and more open-ended.
Coffee. Lately we’ve been into Hyperion. This is a small coffee shop in downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan, that we visit whenever we’re there, but this time we brought home some beans. Titan, their espresso blend, has a graham cracker and chocolate vibe we’ve been into. Highly recommend it.
Hope you had a great Halloween!
