Those damn Annual Performance Reviews

Posted by William Gallagher

You and your managers pretend these are about developing you and recognising your achievements but all that’s really clear is that are they bollocks. What are they for? Who are they for? It’s not for you and it’s not for getting you more money. Annual performance reviews are about making some token nod toward remembering your name and then ignoring everything when it comes to deciding money.

There’s that thing where a third of your colleagues will fail, a third will do okay and there’s a top third that have to get by on some contrived glory ’cause they sure as hell aren’t getting paid more either.

Now, it’s easy for me to be cynical about these because I’m freelance and don’t have to have them. But for a decade or more I was freelance in the BBC where it was a requirement. I hated every single one – up to the moment I would have them, because they invariably went well. Nonetheless, I hated them more than dental appointments because of one review and one man from before my time at the Corporation.

He was an out-of-his-depth sort who managed a group of fairly awkward writers and me. Not awkward. I was glad to be there, I was doing what I wanted, I got that the job was to get what needed done and I got that the company didn’t owe me anything but the generous salary I had. I was fine. Others were not. So when he had to grade people, he gave the awkward ones good marks and in several cases promotions, and he stuck me with the bad marks because he knew I’d be fine about it.

Frankly, was I fuck. Every other review for every other person that year took about 30 minutes and I made mine take the day. Every single point on every single ridiculous metric, he low-balled it and I argued until I got each one up. Fight, fight, fight – and he won. While I got that review to be far better than he wanted it to be, it was the worst review of the set and I got no raise.

So, he didn’t managed to get the one easy ride he’d planned but he could do the tick that said he’d saved some money.

But of course he saved that yet he lost me. I never worked late again, never came in early again. Didn’t contribute to meetings, didn’t write as well as I had done. I do have trouble assessing the quality of my writing but I thought then that there was a fair chance I was his best writer or at least if there were better I can only think of one person it would be. Actually, thinking about it, yes, she was better than I was. But I’d stake a claim to second best and if you do a Google search now on the names I can remember you won’t find them. None had a writing career after that.

And I didn’t have another review with that guy because by the next year, I was long gone. I was off to an infinitely better job that led directly to my BBC career soon after. He could argue, I suppose, that he helped me there but he did some damage. There was not one single review I ever had anywhere else again that I didn’t go in ready for a fight. Never got one, not one single time: every other review ever was at least great and sometimes superb.

I don’t want to count how many years it is since this boiled me but I can tell you it’s a fair few minutes since I found a funny video about performance reviews and thought I’d point you at it. I think I might take a deep breath and do that next.

Bollocks to maybe, it’s no or it’s hell, yes

Posted by William Gallagher

Those of you who often over-commit or feel too scattered may appreciate a new philosophy I’m trying: if I’m not saying “HELL YEAH!” about something, then say no.

Meaning: When deciding whether to commit to something, if I feel anything less than, “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!” – then my answer is no.

When you say no to most things, you leave room in your life to really throw yourself completely into that rare thing that makes you say “HELL YEAH!”

We’re all busy. We’ve all taken on too much. Saying yes to less is the way out.

No more yes. It’s either HELL YEAH! or no – Derek Sivers blog (28 August 2009)

Read the full piece. It’s from six years ago so it’d be interesting if I could find whether he stuck to it but Lifehacker just spotted this today and has some thoughts on the topic.

Enough with introvert vs extrovert

Posted by William Gallagher

Shyness and being outgoing don’t have anything to do with it; it’s more about where we get our energy from. In fact, the differences are pretty simple:

Introverts get exhausted by social interaction and need solitude to recharge.
Extroverts get anxious when left alone and get energy from social interaction.
That’s it. There’s nothing about shyness, being a homebody, or how adventurous you are. Both types can be social, both can creative, both can be leaders, and so on.

Let’s Quit It with the Introvert/Extrovert Nonsense – Thorin Klosowski, Lifehacker UK (26 June 2015)

Read the full piece.

Bollocks to New Year’s Resolutions

Posted by William Gallagher

Look, it’s your choice: say bollocks to them now or say bollocks to them in a few days, weeks or maybe if you’re very strong, months. The start of a new year comes with more engineering strain than it should, given that the whole thing is an artificial construct and – wait, that does sound like engineering.

I mean this in the same way that you see when we change our clocks, putting them forward or back an hour. Every single time I can guarantee I will end up in a conversation where it’s 8pm, say, and someone tells me that: “Of course, it’s really only 7pm”.

No, it isn’t.

It isn’t 7pm, it isn’t 8pm, the very most you can say about it is that it’s now. (I have a watch that just says ‘Now’ instead of having any hands or digits at all. It is by far the most accurate watch I’ve ever had though I think it’s lost some time lately. That’s my excuse for buying an Apple Watch and I’m sticking to that.)

Anyway, we just collectively agree to call now 7pm or 8pm or whatever it is. There’s a rich source of drama in this – Alan Plater did two terrific radio and then stage plays about when the UK adopted one single time zone and it’s the only time I’ve resented him for finding the drama before me – but now, right now, the clock and the calendar are the same. They are artificial constructs, things we created and that we choose to agree on.

Which all makes sense and is in all ways sensible, practical and – yep – productive. What isn’t is all this stuff we hang on to certain days like pegs. Our birthdays. Shouldn’t it be our mothers getting presents? Anniversary of some seriously painful stuff there. And New Year’s Day. If you didn’t make any resolutions, you at least thought about how you’re not making resolutions.

And if you did then you also know that the New Year’s Resolution Effect lasts but a very short time. Come a rotten wet Tuesday in February, the resolution field is at best membrane-thin.

Which means at some point you go from feeling you must and/or should make resolutions to feeling bad that you failed at them. Come next New Year’s Eve and the next cycle, you go through the same thing but now you have last year’s failure weighing on you. You have every year’s failure weighing on you. If there were ever a resolution that you might actually succeed at, you kill your own chance by the certain and correct knowledge that you have failed every single time before.

Seriously, then. Bollocks to it all.

Don’t make a resolution for the New Year, don’t plan to change something for your life, do something to change today. Do something different or better or new or worse or stupid or anything today. Then tomorrow you have a success on your hands. Possibly a regret too, but we need a few of those.

We want so much and we can do so much. But we can do it one pixel at a time.

Listen, I am by nature a pessimist and I fight it chiefly by racing to do the next thing before the current one dies. Christmas and New Year is sometimes tough for me because I can’t do so much racing. But I used to believe – and I used to think I was clever in believing – that the walk of a thousand miles ends with but 10,997 steps.

(I worked it out.)

This is true. It is also true that the usual form of that saying, about beginning such a walk, is trite and cliché.

But it has a point.

I just think we need to add one more point to it.

Work on something you enjoy doing now and get the enjoyment out of it now. Whether it becomes something bigger, whether you finish the novel or get the TV commission, there is pleasure and satisfication and accomplishment and art in the journey. So enjoy the journey.

Lighten up about the new year and bollocks to new year’s resolutions.

Nope, it’s just badly made glass

Posted by William Gallagher

They could’ve done it as straight text – and they have done it as a spreadsheet – but Information is Beautiful has produced a graphic about 52 of the “world’s most contagious falsehoods”. In other graphics, the most annoying bollocks we all tend to believe. Here’s one sliver of the graphic for example:

Do check out the full image plus more details on Information is Beautiful.

The praise sandwich is baloney

Posted by William Gallagher

You might know this under a different term so let me explain what I mean by praise sandwich. It’s when you have criticism to give a writer and you think it’s going to be pretty bad so you begin with something nice and you end with something encouraging.

The idea is that the little writer believes the praise and is thereby cushioned enough to accept your true criticism. That the poor little writer will learn from you, that you can give them the benefit of your knowledge and do so in such a way that they don’t realise how harsh you’ve really had to be.

Give me strength.

You’re already detecting a certain antagonism from me about this idea so let me nip in quickly with this: no, it hasn’t just happened to me. It’s certainly happened over the years and I think I’ve even been taught to use it too. But I read a piece recently by someone who was advocating it and perhaps because it was couched in a lot of talk about being professional, it narked me.

Because if you actually are a pro, you can smell the praise sandwich from the first bite.

Don’t waste my time with it, don’t insult me with it. If you think you need to give me a praise sandwich, we shouldn’t be working together. We should not be in the same writing group. Good writing groups are so hard to find that I never have. I’ve long since given up trying, though I did have a go with one a few months ago. It wasn’t the right group for me: there was some professional work going on there but not much and at most the writers fed each other praise on toast.

I did too: I ended up talking encouragingly to a writer who will never get her book published. I could tell her why, I had told her why, she just wasn’t ever going to listen. For a simple reason too: she’s not a pro. She’s a reader, not a writer. Usually criticism is just one’s opinion but in this case it was as practical and pragmatic and certain as if she’d told me she was entering a poetry contest and the piece she was submitting was 170,000-word doctoral thesis about trout.

Tell me what good I did her. Tell me what good the praise sandwich I got back was. This was a group that prided itself on being so tough that it could scald the skin off your arms but to me it was kindergarten. It was nap time at kindergarten.

Please, I’m asking you, give me some credit for being a pro and do not use the praise sandwich on me.

You know someone believes this crap

Posted by William Gallagher

Part of me hopes that it’s astrologer Susan Miller. If she actually believes the utter garbage of astrology, there is a word for her and it’s “Goodbye”. If she doesn’t and this is preying on the gullible, there might be other words.

Though either way, someone who claims to be able to foretell the future really shouldn’t have a website that looks like it was designed in the 1980s.

But then, no, hang on, websites are technology and Miller says that this is a bad time to spend any cash on technology. Specifically now, as in some period of weeks around here: I refuse to indulge the nonsense by stating the dates she gives. There’s not a whole lot of point, really: it’s all bollocks and at the end of the period astrologers will says “see? told you” and everybody sensible will have forgotten this crap existed. The only ones left paying attention will be the aforementioned gullible and, you know, there’s just so much you can do to help people.

Such as quoting astrologers and laughing. Miller has been talking to Time magazine, which I usually rather enjoy, saying that we shouldn’t buy iPhones right now because Mercury is in retrograde. Uh-huh. I’m guessing that means we’re at the spot in Mercury’s orbit where because we’re also moving in an orbit we appear to overtake it so Mercury’ seems to fall back or something. Mercury’s fine. Orbiting away. It’s all in how you look at it, where you stand and how stupid you are.

But I can’t accuse someone of having no scientific basis without asking if they have evidence and there is some. There’s proof:

Miller says that her daughter — “an Aries, they never trust what you say and have to do their own little empirical research” — once bought a laptop during Mercury retrograde and had to sell it on eBay after realizing she hadn’t bought enough hard drive space.

Why the Most Famous Astrologer in the Universe Says You Shouldn’t Buy an iPhone Right Now –
Laura Stampler, Time magazine (8 October 2014)

Those Aries rascals. No possible chance that they cocked up and regretted saving some cash by buying a low-spec computer, no. It has to be that the stars and planets of the entire universe aligned across the infinite cosmos to tell her she shouldn’t have gone to Currys.

Talk about not taking responsibility.

If you want to read more then off you pop, the link is under the quote, I don’t want to go there with you. And the full article includes a link to that Website That Time Forgot too.

The bollocks of the ‘can do’ attitude

Posted by William Gallagher

It sounds great on the back of motivational books but, seriously, sometimes you can’t do it. It’s impossible. Go do something else, put that smile to work where you can actually do some good.

Writer Noah St John makes this point in an article called 5 Impossible Goals You Should Stop Going After, specifically:

Now I know that you’re not used to hearing something like that on a personal growth blog. You’re used to hearing things like, “If you can conceive it, you can achieve it,” and “There’s nothing you can’t do when you set your mind to it.”

That’s all well and good for the majority of the goals we set. However, the truth is that there are some things that you and I actually can’t do.

I often tell my coaching clients that if you continue to go after these impossible goals, you will not only waste your time, money, and effort, you will invariably end up feeling frustrated—not because you didn’t try hard enough, but because you’re going after something you shouldn’t have been going after in the first place.

5 Impossible Goals You Should Stop Going After – Noah St John, SteveAitchison.com (undated but probably 14 August 2014)

I like the concept more than I like the rest of his article. The full piece has these five goals he says you should ditch but they’re a bit Hallmark Card Business School-like. I agree about not trying to be perfect all the time, but if you seriously believe you “have to sell 100% of my prospects”, i.e. convince every single person you ever meet that they should buy your particular brand of snake oil, you aren’t listening.

Sometimes you just don’t fit together

Posted by William Gallagher

Just sometimes. You’re with people and it is not clicking. You’re saying something dry and maybe hopefully witty, but is it hot and echoey in here or is it just me? Hello?

Let it go.

Or put it this way: they may be fine people, they may be foul; you may be fine or you may be foul, but bollocks to it all.

Sometimes you can’t fix something and there will be nothing you can do so stop trying.

Move on. Okay?

And yes, I’m talking from personal experience. But you’re reading from personal experience too.