That is a full day's work!

I am starting to work on writing some annual employee performance reviews and I was thinking about one of the first bits of advice my manager gave me when I joined Microsoft  "Don't confuse activity with results". 

As we reflect over the year, it is easy, and natural to think about all the activities we did... the specs we wrote, presentations we gave, partners we managed, etc.  But what is more important is the results we archived, a well received feature, a community excited about our product, partners that are wildly successful, etc.  Of course these results are a bit harder to pin directly to our actions, but it is worth a try as this keeps us focused on the change we are contributing to rather than just spending time and effort. 

As I think about this challenge, I am reminded of a story my wife's grandfather (who recently celebrated his 93rd birthday) tells of how he learned to focus on results instead of activities in his youth on a small farm in the rural North Carolina… On a muggy summer day, he and his brother had plans to meet some friends to go skinny-dipping. Their father, on his way out the door for work that morning, asked his sons to pick up the flat white rocks that littered their field and stack them up. Thinking their day’s plans might still be salvaged through an ill-defined success metric, his son’s very respectfully asked him: “Is there anything else we should do when we finish that?”. But their father was one step ahead of them, he told them “Son, that is a full day’s work. If you finish that, spread the rocks out on the field and pick them up again.” While this foiled the skinny-dipping plan for the day, it helped to instill a strong work ethic that still runs deeply in his family today.

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 28, 2007
  you mean the results we achieved?

• Anonymous
  July 29, 2007
  For some reason I can't help but think of somebody one day telling this story about Grandpa Brad asking asking to have a bunch of code refactored before heading off for an evening of XBox or something, and Brad saying something like "If you get it all refactored before the end of the day, check it out and redo it again, because that young dev is a full days work"

• Anonymous
  July 29, 2007
  What i belive that you should keep trying and this is will automatically provide you result.

• Anonymous
  August 09, 2007
  Dad of grandpa 's result is to foil the skinny-dipping plan, and the activity was picking up stones...