In future I should do more of…

Published on 13 June 2008 in , , ,

At work it’s appraisal time. I don’t like appraisal time. Cos that means I have to write everything up that’s been said so it can sit in the old virtual filing cabinet for 12 months until this time next year when it can be dusted off and I can sit with my line manager and see what I’ve achieved off my last set of goals, so that I can get a new one and write that out. At which point I’ll end up writing another of these blog posts telling you all how I hate appraisal time.

Or something.

I think it’s because the BBC appraisal form is all woolly and well meaning. What should I keep doing? What should I try to do less of? What should I try to do more of?

It feels like those awful “Record of Achievement” things kids do at school. Where the kid has to write five pages of why they’re crap at Geography, and what they’re going to do to get better handwriting. You know the bit. The bit that the parents always ignore because frankly they don’t care about what the kids think – they just care about the three lines the teacher has written at the bottom of the page.

But maybe that’s not the point. Maybe the whole point of school “Record of Achievements” is to prepare you in life, and build up your skills so that you can sit in an office and do the same thing for the next 30 odd years of your life.

And perhaps the reason why I hate appraisals so much is because I lack those skills, thanks to my secondary school deciding that actually the old Record of Achievement was actually a complete waste of time, and as such just did the old fashioned report instead. You know the ones – where they write huge essays about how crap you are ay Geography, how your handwriting is illegible, and how you’re not achieving anything because you’re constantly staring out of the window.

It probably all stems down from that. What I actually want is my line manager to sit down and write “Andrew could achieve so much more if he didn’t spend so much time web surfing and blogging in company time. Especially when he should be writing his appraisal. Could try harder. B+” instead.

Mind you, that has a flip side. Now that I actually have some line managees myself, I’d have to write their appraisals for them� Hmm. Write four for them, or one for myself� Perhaps there is some merit in this system after all�

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