Last Monday, close to 11 pm, I caught myself running a performance review. No agenda. No documentation. No HR in the room, which is a problem, because the manager conducting it was ruthless.
The manager was me. So was the employee. There was no raise involved.
This meeting isn't new. It shows up on its own timeline, usually right as I'm trying to sleep, and it always covers the same ground: everything I could have done better, examined in detail, with no room for me to respond.
The review that never ends
I've talked about this with enough women in leadership to know it isn't unique to me. A lot of us are running a version of the same unofficial development plan. Nobody opened it, nobody's closing it, and it just keeps running in the background, using up energy that should be going somewhere else.
Here's what made me stop and pay attention.
At StringCan, our performance reviews are structured, monthly, and short. That's intentional. Structure means nobody has to guess what needs work. It means asking for help is built into the process instead of something someone has to work up the nerve to bring up. And growth actually gets talked about out loud instead of sitting as an unspoken expectation that isn't fair to anyone.The real value of the structure is that it ends. There's a start, there are questions, and then it's done. The person walks out knowing where they stand, and they don't have to think about it again until next month.
The review I run on myself doesn't have that. It never closes.
So I tried something that felt a little strange to say out loud: give myself the same thing I give my team. A real review, scheduled, structured, monthly, written down.
This isn't journaling. It isn't a gratitude list. Nothing wrong with either one, but this needed a cadence, a structure, and a manager, even if that manager is me.
When I sat down to draft the questions, my first pass was all business: what did I get done, what needs work, what's the growth area. Halfway through, I realized I was just rebuilding the same review the world already runs on me. My output isn't short on evaluation. What's missing is any real check-in with the person doing all the producing.
I scrapped that draft and started over with something that barely resembles a performance review, which is probably why it works.
Two questions to open, four to close
Every real review has two parts, because you don't grade someone in December on goals nobody set in January.
At the start of the month:
What's one emotion I want to work on this month? Just one. Impatience, or that specific flavor of guilt that shows up the moment I take a Friday afternoon off. Name it, write it down.
What refills my cup when it's empty? Actual activities, not concepts. "Balance" doesn't count as an answer. A walk without my phone does.
At the end of the month: How did it go with that emotion? Not a grade. Grading myself is exactly the habit I'm trying to break. I'm looking for specific moments, and what I did differently than I would have a year ago.
How many times did I actually refill the cup, and what happened? This one's a number. Numbers are hard to argue with, and I've tried. A low number tells you something real. It also puts your own maintenance on the same level of importance as everything else on your plate.
What did I learn about myself? If the answer is nothing, I wasn't paying attention that month.
What am I ready to let go of? This is the one that makes the whole thing work. Something comes off the 11 pm agenda for good. A review that never closes anything isn't a review. It's just surveillance with extra steps.
The question that stopped me
I ran the opening questions for the first time last week, and I got stuck fast. Not on the emotion question. I had that one answered before I finished reading it. It was the cup question.
I could tell you exactly what refills the cup for every person on my leadership team. I sat there with a pen and genuinely struggled to answer it for myself.
That told me something I didn't love hearing: I've been managing everyone's sustainability except my own, and calling it discipline.
You already run this playbook
I can't tell you yet how the closing questions land, since I haven't gotten there. I don't know if this holds up past six months. It might turn into one more thing I get rigorous about, and yes, I hear how that sounds.
But if any of this sounds familiar, here's what you already know how to do. You would never let anyone on your team operate the way you let yourself operate: no structure, no stated growth focus, no clear way to ask for help, nothing ever resolved, just an open-ended review running around the clock. You'd call that a management failure, because it is one, and you'd have it fixed by Thursday.
You already know how to fix this. You do it for your team constantly. This isn't a new skill. It's extending the same professional courtesy to yourself that you extend to everyone you lead. And it doesn't stop with you. Your team isn't learning how to manage themselves from what you say in a meeting. They're learning it from what you tolerate in yourself.
Take the questions if they're useful, or build your own. The specific set matters less than the meeting existing at all. Put it on the calendar, monthly, and give it the same weight you'd give a review with your best person, because that's exactly what it is.
My 11 pm manager showed up again this week, right on schedule, uninvited as usual. This time I had somewhere to send her. Feedback noted. Review's on the 30th. She can wait in the lobby.
Yours can wait too.
If this landed, Sarah writes String by String weekly. Subscribe on LinkedIn or connect with her there.
