There is a Calvin and Hobbes Comic Strip with the first 11 squares depicting Calvin engaged in various leisure activities. In the 12th frame, Calvin’s Mom asks him to take a bag of garbage to the trash can. With composure completely changed, in the next frame, Calvin laments, “Some vacation THIS Summer is!”
Similarly, each time we are returning from a Family Vacation my wife likes to ask our children what their favorite place or activity was on the trip. Invariably they offer one of two answers; it’s the last thing that we did or it’s the cheapest thing we did. On our last trip the consensus answer was ‘collecting shells at the beach.’
These are great scenarios to consider as we are fully in “Annual Review” Season.
I advise two things:
1. Consider Shorter Intervals for Reviews – Don’t throw-out or dismiss the Annual Review, but begin making it the continuation or culmination of several Reviews done throughout the year. This way, even if one Review is too focused on a specific area or metric, having them more frequently should prevent being too myopic. This lessens the chance we throw out the other success of the year (that completely ruined our Summer) with what is likely only a recent failure (or unwanted chore).
2. Discover, Highlight, and Maximize the Easy (Cheap) Things – In the example of our vacation it’s the ‘collecting shells at the beach.’ I say discover because what do we do if their is no opportunity to ‘collect shells’ on our next vacation. You see, however, it was not about shell collecting at all. It was about all of us being present, yet everyone could move at their own pace. We weren’t worried about time or lines. There was a sense of adventure. Find the correlations between what you like to do and what you do well and then maximize your time doing more of those and similar things.
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