Sometimes you can make a great indirect impact by investing little effort. These might feel not very valuable, and even useless for performance review. However, those things could be the most valuable things you do (think averting crises before they happen, or steering projects towards much better outcomes) - just need to accumulate critical mass to show it.

Have a carefully curated list of “best of the best” stuff - this could come in quite handy to support your performance evaluation narrative.

Record what you’re doing at least at a weekly cadence - this will help remembering what you achieved and make it easier to write a self-review, and support communicating your results in many other ways.

You are not in control of the performance evaluation process and outcomes, but there are many ways how you can influnence them. Don’t completely rely on others (e.g. your manager) to build a narrative and present your results on their own - summarize the results and build the narrative for them (or, even better, with them).

I once stumbled upon a quote “if people knew how to use grep, awk, sed, and xargs, half of the applications would never need to be created.” I think roughly the same can be said about spreadsheets - knowing how to use just a few features and functions allows handling quite complex use cases within just a few hours. In this post, I’ll cover a few of those most-useful-but-a-bit-complex spreadsheet’s functions and features and show how they combine to build a “habit tracker” spreadsheet.