Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. My index finger was starting to ache, hovering over the trackpad like a nervous hummingbird. Eleven months of digital correspondence blurring into a singular, monotonous stream. The inbox, a digital graveyard of forgotten projects and fleeting acknowledgements, now demanded resurrection. Not for the sake of revisiting actual work, mind you, but for the sacred annual ritual: the self-assessment.
Ah, yes. The annual performance review. The charade of all charades. A bureaucratic marvel, exquisitely designed to reduce a year’s worth of complex thought, unexpected pivots, and genuine effort into a handful of bullet points, meticulously polished to fit into a pre-defined template. My eyes glazed over a subject line from October 22, then another from August 22. It felt less like a professional exercise and more like forensic archaeology, digging through digital detritus for ‘evidence’ that would, ostensibly, justify my existence for the next 12 months.
The core frustration isn’t merely the time suck, though that’s a significant component. It’s the insult to intelligence. We’re asked to perform a meticulous self-evaluation, often on forms that haven’t changed in a decade or two, knowing full well that our carefully crafted narratives will likely be skimmed for a mere 2 minutes or less by a manager already buried under their own cascading deadlines. Then, to add another layer of theatrical absurdity, this fragmented self-report is synthesized with a manager’s equally rushed perspective, all to finalize compensation decisions that were, let’s be
