Do you ever take the time to look back on old performance appraisals? During my January decluttering blitz, I went through the filing cabinet in our home office. Lurking at the back, I discovered a folder of handwritten performance appraisals from the early 1990s. Finding and reading through them inspired me to dust off the Clutter Tales series.

About Clutter Tales

Clutter Tales is a series where we tell the stories of our lives through our clutter. During my decluttering journey, I found a lot of things that took me back to a different place and time. Instead of casually discarding them, I decided to honour them by telling their story. I’ve written Clutter Tales about a high school shorthand textbook, an old airline ticket, a travel diary from my trip to France at age 18, notes from a visit to a fortune teller, and more!

Along with my own reflections, this series has featured posts by some of my favourite bloggers. If you’d like to write a guest post for Clutter Tales, please get in touch. I’d love to give you the opportunity to properly thank your clutter by sharing its story too!

Now, on to today’s Clutter Tale…

Handwritten performance appraisals from the 1990s

After I retired from my full-time job in June 2024, I did an initial cleanup of my home office and got rid of a bunch of stuff. I wrote about some of the treasures I found there in a previous edition of Clutter Tales. It has been almost two years, so it was time for another round. This time, I was more ruthless.

Lurking in a folder at the back of the filing cabinet was a collection of old performance appraisals. The oldest ones were from the early days of my career in the retirement business, when I was working at Mutual Life of Canada in the early 1990s.

The first thing that stood out was was that they were handwritten. It was the era of mainframe computers and centralized printing, so handwriting was really the only way to maintain confidentiality. PCs didn’t appear in the office until Microsoft released Windows 3.1 in 1992.

So twice a year, every supervisor and manager would handwrite a performance appraisal for each of their staff. They worked on them for days. Back then, there was no AI to do the writing, or even the ability to copy and paste comments. Each performance appraisal was personalized, so they actually meant something.

What did my supervisors have to say?

As I read through the performance appraisals, a few things stood out:

• Although I stayed in the same area of the company, I had 6 jobs, 4 bosses, and was promoted twice in my first two years in the retirement business. I started as an Issue Clerk, issuing retirement and pension plans. After that, I was an Amendment Clerk and a Reissue Clerk before being promoted to a Senior Amendment Clerk and then a Section Head. Along the way, there’s mention of me being a Project/Procedure Manager—a job I have no recollection of. In the later years of my career, I always thought the constant changes and reorganizations were a new development, but that’s clearly not the case.
• The positive comments reflect strengths and skills that remained true for the rest of my career:
  • Adept at explaining things in an easy-to-understand manner.
  • Easy to get along with.
  • Organized
  • Treating everyone with respect.
• The only negative comment related to showing my frustration and reacting outwardly to stressful situations. I never did have a good poker face, although I did learn to pick my battles in later years. Looking back, I realize many things that are important to us in the moment turn out to be insignificant later. Few of our jobs are life or death, so why do we treat them that way? When a staff member would make a mistake in later years, I’d often say. “It’s okay. Nobody died.” 

I was promoted to a supervisor role—we called them Section Heads in those days—in 1992. While I don’t recall handwriting performance appraisals, I suppose I must have in the early days.

By the end of my career, we wrote our own performance appraisals, and our leader would just add a sentence or two. I wonder what today’s leaders would think if they had to spend hours handwriting the reviews.

I don’t know why I hung onto these handwritten performance appraisals for all these years. In the business world, anything you did more than six months ago is meaningless when a new leader comes along and you have to prove yourself all over again.

It was interesting to see the comments and look back on the early days of my career, but I have now put these old documents in the recycling pile. It’s time to let them go.  

I hope you enjoyed this installment of Clutter Tales. If you’d like to write a guest post for Clutter Tales, please get in touch. I’d love to give you the opportunity to properly thank your clutter by sharing its story too!

Do you hang on to old work documents like performance appraisals or samples of your work from long ago? What did your early bosses have to say about you? Tell me your thoughts below.