As we begin a new year, a lot of talk is about New Year’s resolutions, and looking forward to the future. We look at things that we want to accomplish, places we’d like to go, people we want to spend time with and the like. But much like the old adage, it’s hard to know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been, and this is a great time to look back over the previous year and evaluate it.

We can do this in all aspects of our lives (”Did I lose the weight I wanted to? Did I maintain contact with my old friends? Take that vacation I’ve been promising myself?”), but in the world of employment, this is generally formalized into one’s annual performance review.

As this can have a large impact on our successes in the coming years, how can we make sure that we’re getting the exceptional reviews that we want (and deserve, I’m sure)?

First, there are generally two things we can be judged on at work: the time we put in and the results we put out.

(Insert percentage here)% of life is just showing up

Now, if you’re being evaluated purely on the amount of time you put in at the office, there’s not necessarily a whole lot I can recommend (except perhaps finding another job). Basically, you need to show up, and that’s that. I think that for most of us, this is only a portion of our evaluation, rather than the whole thing, and is changing as telecommuting and other flexible working arrangements become more and more popular.

1 + 1 = 2

There are two ways to evaluate the work you produce when you’re at the office (or working from wherever you are); the quantity of your work, and the quality of your work. Ideally, you’d like to strike a good balance between the two (an acceptable quantity of high-quality work), but working on one to the exclusion of the other can be detrimental to your long term success.

I’m going to approach this topic in three parts. Tomorrow, on a special Tuesday post, I’ll talk about how you can increase the quantity of your work. Wednesday, I’ll talk about a few ways to improve the quality of this same work, and then Friday I’ll talk about what we can do when we get these exceptional reviews.

Meanwhile, if you’ve got any tips you’d like me to include in any of these articles, drop me an email at adam@liveworkbalance.com and I’ll try to integrate everything I can!

Cheers, and we’ll see you tomorrow!

Adam