Week 4 Stand-up: The self-review as fiction

The self-review is the one document you write that reaches the calibration room. This week you learn to write one that survives being summarised.

18 March 2027

This week's trickQuantify everything, including the parts you made up.

Who paysThe person who submitted the honest version.

Your manager carries three things into calibration: their memory of your quarter, the numbers, and your self-review. The first two are largely out of your hands. This stand-up is about the third.

Bring#

Your laptop, and everything you have done this semester in any subject, job or club. Not a summary. The list.

The trick#

Every accomplishment in your self-review should carry a quantified impact statement. “Improved the onboarding documentation” is invisible; “reduced median onboarding time by 40% through a targeted documentation refresh” is a data point. Where measurement was not in place, a defensible estimate is an acceptable proxy. Calibration operates on summaries, and summaries preserve numbers.

What happens#

You start a brag document: one line per thing you did, dated, kept from now until the end of semester. Then you take one line and write it three ways: honestly, with a number, and with a number you could not defend. The group tries to tell the second from the third. This is harder than it should be. Then the group ranks the three as a manager would. The honest one comes last every time, which is what it costs the person who submitted it.

How you know it worked#

Your brag document exists, it has more lines than you expected, and you can see which of your sentences would survive a manager’s three-minute summary.