These bureaucratic time-killing exercises are the worst thing about working in the federal government.

That sounds real PITA but what other choices do you have?

Anonymous wrote:That’s just an academic exercise. We write our own annual performance appraisals. Not even sure if our supervisors read them.

My supervisor goes over it in details
Writes his own summary to justify our raise. We are not a step based GS scale, we are merit/performance raises so lots of documentation

That’s just an academic exercise. We write our own annual performance appraisals. Not even sure if our supervisors read them.

We just wrote our self assessments, and every year I feel stymied by the exercise. My supervisor goes over it every year line by line, so I need to be able to map my accomplishments back to my plan but the mapping feels messy.

We have a broad objective like “support scientific research” (in a research scientist), and then about 30 bullet points describing various tasks like “written reports to management”, “tracking experiments”, “innovate to solve problems”, and “improve documentation and be mindful of stakeholder goals”.

I’m fine with the broad objective, and am happy to write about the work I did, with experiments run, reports written, problems encountered and what I contributed to solving. But I struggle to map the reality back to the super generic and then generic and inflexible bullets.

I have 5 broad objectives, so we are looking at like 150 bullets to map to.

Does everyone do this? It takes me an incredible amount of time mapping things back rather than saying what I did.

I would love to push back at perf plan generation stage and say “can we make this just the broad objective without the bullet points” but I feel that would not be well received.