Personal Retrospectives

For a little over a year, I have set aside some time on Friday of each week to run a personal retrospective in a similar vein to the Agile ceremony (I actually have a recurring appointment in my Outlook for this). Essentially I reflect on the past week and write down what went well and areas to improve and keep the running log in a retrospectives file on my computer. This was especially useful when starting a new job as it helped not only to allow me to see how I was progressing but also to keep me focused on working toward an improved future.

One of the other great benefits has been when evaluation season comes around. The past few companies I have worked for have had a review cycle that starts with a self-evaluation, and I always found writing one both tedious and difficult. I would rely only on memory (maybe supplemented with records of where I had charged time or similar heuristics) which meant I had forgotten many events toward the beginning or even the middle of the review period. This reflects an all-too-common complaint about evaluations: events nearer to the end of the period have disproportionately increased significance. Thus a year-end review becomes a summary of the previous month - not helpful. Keeping a weekly retrospective helps to guard against this by saving those noteworthy events from the entire period and telling a story of progress and professional development (hopefully!).

Needless to say, these retros makes it very easy for me to take stock of many of the items I would like to reflect in my self-evaluation. The other key tool is a simple to-do list manager like pstodo (see the Motivation in the introductory Todo kata post) which helps me have more productive retrospectives (both personal and with the team) and further fill in any gaps in my self-eval.

Summary

1. Carve out time at the end of each week to have a personal retrospective and log:
   • What went well
   • Areas to improve
2. Reference your retrospectives log when writing self-evaluations
3. Bonus: having a to-do list manager helps with both retros and evals