Notice Concerning Year End Achievement List
The annual practice of assembling a list of personal achievements before the year ends has produced a document that does not match the year as experienced.
Meeting Minutes: Year End Achievement List Annual Reconciliation Session, December 2021
Attendees
One person. Themselves.
Purpose
To produce a list of achievements from the calendar year 2021 for purposes of self-review, performance documentation, and the feeling that the year is being properly concluded.
Session Summary
The session began with an open document and the intent to list achievements. The first item was added without difficulty. It was a significant item. The second item required a moment of recollection. The third item was debated internally as to whether it constituted an achievement or simply a thing that happened.
Items Added
Items added in the first ten minutes: four. All significant. All easily recalled.
Items added in the next thirty minutes: three. Smaller in scale. Required consulting email records from the second quarter to confirm that they occurred.
Items considered and not added: several. These included: things that were outcomes of other people's work with the person's involvement, things that were good but whose goodness was difficult to quantify, and one item that was added, stared at, and removed twice.
The Gap
The list, at completion, will contain eight to twelve items that represent the year accurately in the sense that they all occurred, and inaccurately in the sense that they were not what the year felt like.
What the year felt like is not listable. What the year felt like included: sustained ambient difficulty, several weeks of unexpected competence, a long plateau in the spring, and a late September period that was neither good nor bad but that took up a significant amount of time and attention.
None of these are achievements. They are the year.
Items Omitted
Items that are omitted from the list include: every week in March, a sustained period of low productivity that is not categorized as an achievement, and the general texture of the year.
Governing Absurdity
The achievement list exists to capture the year. The year is too large and uneven to fit into a list of achievements. The list captures the portions of the year that can be named as completions. The portions that cannot be named as completions are larger and took more time, and the list omits them entirely, producing a document that is accurate and selective in equal measure.
Contradiction
The list is used to demonstrate what was accomplished. The things that were most difficult to accomplish during the year are absent from the list because difficulty is not the same as completion.
Action Items
None. The list will be completed before the 31st.
Next Meeting
December 2022.