So at work, it's once again time to do employee reviews. I hate this.
I mean, I think most every hates assessment time, but my problem is that I don't know, off the top of my head, what I did over the past six months. Oh sure, you can give me a prompt of "what did you do with project XYZ" and I can answer it well, mostly by just telling you what project XYZ is, and along the way pointing out bits I remember doing. But the open ended "what did you do" feels impossible.
Sometimes I've had managers wonder why I didn't count as work anything that didn't result in code in a repo, or why I'd talk about "not getting anything done" when all I'd done that hour/day/week/whatever was planning meetings or writing docs or working on stuff locally.
It's because without external artifacts that automatically timestamp themselves, I don't know that I've done anything. Every attempt at getting me to document what I've been doing on a regular, daily basis has failed, usually quite quickly. I don't know why, but I just end up with nothing to say day after day, and after two or three of those I stop.
This is a multi-decade-long issue. Yes, I've tried GTD. (Or rather, I got the book and tried to read it and just dropped it because the author could not get to the point. I might try it again, but if I do I'm going to read it until I finally find the five pages where he actually tells you something besides "this method has helped so many people", black out the rest of the book, and leave it in a little free library. Seriously, what is this system and why won't he just tell you what it is?) I've tried "daily diary time". I tried some emacs plugin that popped something up every so often to have me fill in what I was doing; I don't think that lasted a full day.
How do other people do this? How are you able to be aware of what you've done over some period in the past?
So I guess the first thing I need to go is hope that I can reconstruct the relatively recent past from git and jira.