It’s that time of year again. The holidays? Well, yeah, that too, I guess. I’m talking about Year-End Reviews. You know: those few weeks where you get to explain to your boss about what a wonderful job you did and how he can’t live without you. I usually take ‘em pretty seriously: anything generating paperwork that lands in your permanent HR file has got to be important, right?
But, taking reviews seriously means it comes with an additional cost: focused concentration. The kind that only comes when you have a full 90 minutes of uninterrupted Me time. Cubicleland offers precious few moments to take five-minute personal phone call, let alone a full hour to think straight. Usually, with these kinds of things, I duck out to a coffeeshop with a laptop or notepad so I don’t get prodded every so often for my TPS reports.
Today found me holed up in a pizzaria in Warren (home to arguably the best meatball parm in New Jersey) flipping through binders of material. One holds my weekly status reports of all the stuff I did over the past 8 months and the other holds corporate material on how reviews are supposed to go and what sort of career path opportunities are available to me and yada, yada, yada. Naturally, the iPod earbuds are stuffed in my ears, in part to drown out the blaring CNN on the overhead TV, and in part to try to motivate me to get this stuff done during my lunch break. With not a little irony, the Fountains come on and remind me about stuff that reallly matters, and that justifying my existence doesn’t have to mean 16 bulletpoint accomplishments.
Hours on the phone making pointless calls
I got a desk full of papers that means nothing at all
Sometimes I catch myself staring into space
Counting down the hours ’til I get to see your face
— Hey Julie, Fountains of Wayne
Large companies don’t actually tend to do large things. They do simple things, and they distribute the work out very widely so that they can do a LOT of that simple thing (it’s how to make things scale).
Unfortunately, that means that each cog on it’s own is pretty meaningless, which is a tough way to spend your day.