116. Understanding What You Read and How to Know If You’re Performing Well at Work (Q&A)
Episode 116
You're putting in the work. You're doing the readings. You're showing up. So why does it still feel like you're missing the mark? In this month's Q&A episode, I'm answering two listener questions that are completely different on the surface, but have the same core issue.
Question one comes from a grad student who's annotating and highlighting every reading but still feels lost in class discussions
Question two comes from someone two years into their first corporate job who keeps getting decent reviews but can't shake the feeling they're underperforming.
Different situations. Same root problem. And today I'm giving you the strategies to solve it.
What You Learn:
The 3 levels of reading comprehension — and why most students are stuck at level one without knowing it
Why annotation only works when it has a specific purpose (and how to set that purpose before you read)
The two self-check questions to ask after every chunk of reading that will tell you exactly where your comprehension stands
Why "priming your mental schema" before you read dramatically improves how much you retain and understand
Why the transition from school to work is harder than people give it credit for — and the cognitive distortion that makes it worse
The 4-question audit for collecting real data about your actual performance (instead of running on anxiety)
How to reverse-engineer the rubric your workplace will never hand you
What a personal performance dashboard is and how to build one that helps you self-evaluate over time
🔗 Resources + Episodes Mentioned:
⭐SchoolHabits University: (SchoolHabitsUniversity.com)
⭐The College Note-Taking Power System (CollegeNoteTakingSystem.com)
⭐Assignment Management Power System (AssignmentManagementSystem.com)
Episode 71 - Grad School Overload
Episode 37 - How to Accept Feedback (and What to Do With It)
Never stop learning.
❤️Connect:
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The following transcript was autogenerated and may contain some interesting and silly errors. But in the name of efficiency and productivity, I choose not to spend my time fixing them 😉
Understandig What You Read and How to Know If You're Performing Well at Work (Q&A)
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[00:00:00] So I wanna start today's episode with something that I don't think gets talked about enough, which is this really specific kind of frustration that high achieving people run into. When you're doing everything right, you're putting in the time, you're checking all the boxes, and you still feel like you're somehow missing the mark.
And the really disorienting part is that we can't even point to concrete evidence that anything is actually wrong. We just feel it. But that feeling often lies to us, or at least it might be. And that's what we're gonna figure out today.
Welcome to one of our monthly q and a episodes where I answer questions submitted by listeners. I am Katie. This is episode 116.
We've got two listener questions today. One is from a first year grad student who is doing all of the readings, annotating and highlighting, and putting in the hours, and still feeling lost in class discussions.
And then the second question is from someone who's two years into their first corporate job, getting decent job reviews, but can't shake the feeling that they are falling [00:01:00] short.
Two different situations, but when I was thinking through what my answers were gonna be to each of their questions, I realized that they're kind of actually the same problem underneath. And that's what I want you to be listening for as we go through today's episode. Now remember, because these are q and a episodes, the format is a little different.
I'm going to read each question and then answer it directly. But even if your situation doesn't match either of these exactly or you weren't the one submitting the question, I encourage you to stay with both answers all the way through because the strategies do apply broadly. 'cause sometimes people ask questions that we didn't even know we had ourselves.
As always, I list the links and resources. In the show notes and in the description box. If you are watching on YouTube, please subscribe share this with someone who needs to hear it. You can come find me on Instagram at School Habits and, all right, let's get into it.
[00:02:00] All right, so I am gonna read our first question. Our first question is from a grad student. They say, hi Katie. Thanks for answering our questions on your show.
I've binged a bunch recently and I'm so grateful for what you're sharing. Thank you. You are welcome. Thanks for those lovely words. I'm in my first year of a master's program. I do all the readings, I annotate and I highlight. I spend hours on these, but when we get to class discussions, I feel like I missed everything.
When other people are talking about the articles, I'm sitting there thinking, did we read the same thing? I'm clearly putting in the time, but I don't actually feel like I understand the material at a deep enough level, but I don't seem to know that until it's too late. What am I doing wrong? Thanks so much.
Again, [00:03:00] thanks for your really kind words and thanks for your question. I love that you've been binging the show lately. Love to hear that. I think that your question does hit close to home for a lot of grad students, maybe even for some undergrad students, but definitely for high achieving students in general.
But the first thing that I wanna say right out of the gate is that you're not doing anything wrong in terms of effort. A lot of times that is at the root of the problem that someone literally isn't doing the readings and then they're wondering why they're not doing well in class. Or maybe they're doing the readings, but they're just really hastily skimming them or plugging them into AI for a summary and then wondering why they didn't remember anything.
'cause we don't remember summaries. We remember what we read for real. That's not your case at all. It sounds like you genuinely are putting in the effort. You are putting in the time. So let me be clear that the problem is not your work ethic at all. I'm thinking with the information that I have is that the problem might be that you're using the wrong strategy and that you [00:04:00] might be unaware that the strategy you are using, which may have worked at one point at a different level of curriculum, that that strategy has a ceiling, like maybe it hasn't scaled with you.
So my goal and my answer is to get at the core of that. So let me start by explaining what happens when we read challenging texts. There's three very different levels of processing when we read, and many students, even smart graduate students tend to operate at level one, but they're thinking it's at level three. So let me go over what these three levels are real quick.
Level one, let's just call it recognition. Okay? These aren't like the real names of them, it's what I call them, but I, I do the concept of like layers of comprehension is legitimate.
So I'm gonna call level one recognition. That is the sense of, okay, this generally looks familiar. You've seen the words before, you've probably covered some of the concepts in class. You're literally moving your eyes back and forth across the paper or the page. [00:05:00] The text is written in your native language.
And that sense of familiarity can feel a lot like understanding and comprehension, but it's actually not. It's just recognition and exposure to something familiar. Level two is comprehension. That is the, I can explain this level. It's not just that you've seen it before, but that you probably could close the article or cover it up and turn to someone and tell them what it was about.
Maybe you could, um, clarify or, or, or explain what the author was arguing, maybe why it was important. You could summarize it fairly concisely, right? That's level two. And then level three, the golden level. That's application, that is the, I can connect this to something else in a different context level.
You can maybe compare it to another text. You can push back on it. You can see where it fits into a larger conversation. You can poke holes in the argument. You can detect nuances in the argument. [00:06:00] Okay. That's level three and that's grad level. And especially in grad school, class discussions and even papers are kind of at that level two and three, right?
Reading something in your native language that generally looks familiar to you and just highlighting things that generally feel important, that's only round level one, and that's probably what's happening. And you said that you're annotating and that you are highlighting, and that's good.
That's honestly better than a lot of people are doing. But this takes me to my next point that I wanna make because annotating only works if it has, um, like a purpose, if it's done with really, uh, narrowed intention. Because if you sit down to read and your only goal is that you demand to yourself that you, you know, understand this text, then your brain is gonna do the cog cognitive equivalent of just nodding along.
Right. It's gonna collect words, it's gonna recognize sentences, but it's not gonna get to that level two or three that you're going to [00:07:00] need to get to because you haven't really told your brain that that's what it needs to do. You haven't given it direction. You haven't told it specifically what to look for or what to do while you're reading that text.
So that's where annotation with a strategy comes in. It has to have a purpose before you read. And to be honest, the purpose changes depending on what the text is about, what, um, type of text it is, maybe what you're gonna be doing with the text in the future, like if you're gonna be tested on it versus if you're going to use it to write an essay or you're gonna create a presentation about it, right?
So the purpose of your annotations changes with every reading that you're expected to do. So your annotations are gonna look different on every single text that you read across different classes. Sometimes your job is to clarify the argument, and that means determining what the author is actually claiming. Okay? Well then the annotations would be directed around key arguments that the author is making. Sometimes the purpose is to track evidence, like the author makes a claim, but what is the evidence they're using to [00:08:00] back up their claim? And do you buy it? And will that evidence be good for you to use in a research paper that you're writing?
Okay. Well, if that's the purpose, then you would annotate just for those pieces of evidence. Sometimes the purpose of annotations is to identify assumptions like what is the author taking for granted that they never actually defend?
Sometimes your goal of reading a text is just to map the structure and maybe their rhetorical devices and to identify how the author is formatting their argument. Is it set up like, okay, well here's a claim and here's six pieces of evidence. Are they presenting multiple points of view on the subject?
Well, okay, well then your annotations would be directed toward that purpose. But when you know what you're hunting for, your brain has a little bit more of a compass, so to speak. I'd say a good way to think about this, it's the difference between scanning a crowd in like a crowded stadium for just anybody in general, right?
In which case you wouldn't know if you found the person or not. Okay. Versus scanning a crowd for a person in a red shirt with a blue hat, you [00:09:00] know exactly who to lock in on.
Narrowing your focus changes what you get from the reading. Now, also highlighting on its own. is not a strategy at all. I've said this before in a lot of my study skills, resources, I make this point so strongly in SchoolHabits University highlighting is basically just leaving a footprint, right, to letting people know that like I was here. But it doesn't require you to think it's kind of on, I'm gonna say like a waste of time. There's one scenario in which just highlighting is okay. But I'm not gonna go into that now. But almost always you're gonna wanna pair what you highlighted with a note about why you highlighted it. I call out the highlight and rewrite strategy.
Every highlight should be paired with something justifying that neon swipe.
Now I wanna move to another strategy, and it's all about this concept of metacognition, which is thinking about thinking, it's a fancy word, but it's just self-awareness. Like knowing what you're thinking in the moment In the classroom, I used to teach high school, we would call this like a self-check.
[00:10:00] Okay, so when you're reading, you are supposed to self-check or check in with ourselves once in a while to be like, do I even. Know what's going on here. If we don't self-check, that leads to the scenario of reading like a whole page and getting to the bottom of the page and being like, what on earth did I just read?
Some, I mean, that happens to the best of us, but it happens to me. But like, if that's happening all of the time, then that means that no self-check is happening at all. And that's, um, not gonna lead to comprehension. And I say this is probably the most important habit that I can give you because you did say that you're already annotating.
And I, I just want to touch on annotations to make sure that your annotations had a purpose. But after you finish reading each section of text, maybe that's a paragraph if they're really long, maybe it's two paragraphs, maybe it's a full page. It really depends on the complexity and the length of the text and how it's formatted.
But after a chunk of reading, I want you to stop reading and I want you to turn the article over or cover it up or minimize it if you're reading it online. And I [00:11:00] want you to ask yourself some questions out loud, or even better yet, if you wanna, you know, uplevel this, write your answers down to these questions. And yes, this is in addition to your annotation.
So number one, can I summarize what I just read without looking at it? And you might be quick to say, well, yes I can, but then I want you to follow through with like, okay, well then. Do that. You know, like we, we tend to, um, think that we can do a lot more than we can, or that we give ourselves credit for knowing things when, but then we're put on trial and we're actually put on the spot and say, okay, well, well say it then define it, then do it then, and we can't.
Right? So I want you to hold yourself accountable to that. Maybe just a three sentence summary. If you're only reading a paragraph at a time, a one sentence summary of what you just read. Okay? And write that down. The second question, can I explain the author's main claim in one sentence? So not just what [00:12:00] happened, that's the summary, but what is the author's perspective on that?
Okay. Does the author agree with what happened? Does the author disagree? Does the author appear neutral? Because at the graduate level, so this, this second question wouldn't apply if you're like reading a novel. Right? But if I'm talking about like, if you're reading academic text in, in, in, um, academic articles, because at the graduate level, there are layers to readings. It's usually something that the author's presenting. Okay. And then the author has a view on it, and maybe they're presenting their own view, but a lot of times an academic article is gonna lay out previous, you know, perspectives on the topic, maybe previous studies.
And then the author is gonna kind of layer in their own views, um, and, and like, whether or not they agree or disagree with the arguments that they're presenting. Okay. And they'll, they'll insert their own views there. And that's the kind of comprehension that you're gonna need if you're really gonna fully access the text that you're saying that you want to. So these are the two questions. Again, can I summarize who I just read without [00:13:00] looking at it? And I actually want you to try that, like really minimal, like one to three sentences. And then can I explain the author's main claim about that section, in one sentence?
And I would suggest you write that down as well. Even if like the author would agree with it, you could put a positive, not agree with it, negative. If you can't answer those questions, the reality is you probably don't understand the material yet. That is okay. That is data. It just means that you probably need to reengage with that section before you move on to the next one.
Because moving on to the next section, when we don't fully understand what came before it. Is how you're gonna end up in a class discussion, feeling like you read a completely different text than everyone else in class.
Now, a strategy here too that I do wanna say is that not all graduate level readings need to be read to the degree that I'm describing now.
Like you don't, I mean, when I was in grad school, I read most of my readings, but I also got really [00:14:00] good at knowing which ones I truly needed to develop my comprehension on a subject or to write my paper. And some readings I could just skimm to get the argument to be like, okay, this reading isn't gonna help me with my paper.
I skimmed it enough. This reading is, so then I'm gonna go all in. Alright, but it's not necessary, in my opinion, to do 10 outta 10 on all graduate level reading.
Now a similar side note here is that a hundred percent comprehension I don't think is necessary. At least I don't think so. I think that 70%, that's usually what I advise my students. If you can read a challenging text and reach about a 70% understanding of what's going on, you're gonna be okay from, you know, most general class discussions.
And then if it's a text that you're, like I said, that you're really gonna need to understand, 'cause you're gonna have to do something significant with it, like a paper or present, then you shoot for that higher percentage.
Okay. But this is metacognition, thinking about your own thinking. And it's one of the highest leverage skills that we can build as a graduate student because [00:15:00] doing this gives us real time feedback on whether our comprehension is where it needs to be.
You know what I mean? And no, I cannot stop myself right now from saying that's something that AI cannot do for you. Alright? I will always slip something like that in. I have a lot of feelings about that. Anyways, one final strategy that I wanna give you is around the concept of priming your mental schema.
I know that sounds scary, but I'm gonna unpack that. I have an example I'm gonna share because I've been doing this a lot with a student lately. But priming is the idea that we prepare our brains for what it is we're about to read. Think about priming the walls before you paint them. And you put a layer of primer on the wall so that the paint sticks. It's the same thing with learning.
If you're just learning something right out of the blue and you've never heard of it before and it's completely brand new concepts, your brain is gonna be like, what the heck do I even do with this? It's not gonna know what neural pockets to store that information in, but if you prime yourself [00:16:00] before you do the reading, then your brain's gonna say, okay, well I know where to store this. This material is like this other material, right? Like it's gonna have a schema that already exists. Priming is doing a little bit of research. I mean, we're talking about like five minutes. Okay. I am not adding work to the workload. So who's the author? What are their beliefs? Why are they writing what they're writing?
What's the time period that they wrote it in? What's going on in the world during that time when they wrote it in? You could even research themes of the text if it's like a novel. Okay. And having just a really basic, simple understanding of what it is that you're gonna be reading and who wrote it and maybe who it's for and why they wrote it, and sort of the larger context, um, of the environment and it was written in, that is gonna make your comprehension of it so much deeper.
Yeah, let me give you the example I was talking about. I work with a student in my private practice, um, awesome, awesome student. They're in a nursing program, very competitive nursing program, and for an elective, like a required [00:17:00] elective, they could choose something and they chose to take a philosophy course.
And a lot of the readings, if anyone listening, has taken a philosophy course, I loved, I loved my philosophy course in college mind. Blowing right? But those are ultra thick and nitty and gritty and require holding conflicting beliefs in your mind at the same time. And these are really hard academic articles.
And so we've been reading them together and this kid has struggled to understand these readings to cite despite being like a really brilliant student. So before we do, every one, we prime. Okay. We look into who the philosopher is. Many of them are pretty famous philosophers from like the past, right? But some of them are modern philosophers.
We Google them and we say, okay, what are they generally arguing? What are their beliefs in general? What are other arguments that they've made in other texts? What are they known for? If it's an older philosopher, what was going on in that time period? If it's a current philosopher, we just like look at the [00:18:00] news.
And then just this little bit of priming has made such a difference going into these texts because then we take it one paragraph at a time. We shoot for 70% gist understanding. We're going in with very intention driven annotations. So in this case, we're annotating for points of argument. So whether it's a philosopher's argument or maybe arguments that the philosopher is disputing or presenting, like we're always on the lookout for
this is an argument. This is an argument. This is an argument. It's a philosopher's argument. It's someone else's argument. Right. That's been really helpful for this student because this is, honestly, just cognitive science and it's the reason that pre-reading or priming is a a real strategy, right? That I teach. Our comprehension improves dramatically when we have somewhere to put the information that's coming at us so that it can build that mental structure and build the memory of what it is that you're reading, so that you can go into your class having remembered and understood and be capable [00:19:00] of talking about what you read in those class discussions.
All right, so here's where I wanna leave this answer. Back to the top, your effort is incredible. You are doing the right things and the fact that you are asking this question just like tremendous. You're putting in the time, putting in the work, but I don't want you reading harder. Okay? That is not gonna be the solution to a comprehension problem.
Reading more intentionally with metacognition is gonna be the solution. So remember, read with a purpose. Check your understanding in real time, asking yourself those two questions. Can I summarize what I just read and can identify what the author's view is of this chunk of text? And that's really what that is.
It's going from passive reading to active reading, and that's what's gonna make your class discussions just feel so much different. You are gonna feel a lot more confident walking into those.
And then one final thing to you or anyone else listening, um, who's in a grad program, if you feel like the vol volume of work in your program it's just like a lot, like it's not [00:20:00] even just that the readings are hard, but it's the volume of it. I did an episode on grad school overload. That is episode 71. I think that's gonna be really relevant for you. I will link it in the description. Okay. I hope you found that helpful. Very awesome question. And we are now gonna move on to our next question, and this one is coming from someone who is early-ish into their first corporate job. Here it is. I'm gonna read it.
Hi Katie. I'm about two years into my first corporate job. I get decent performance reviews so far, but no one ever gives me really clear metrics for what top performance looks like. I'm constantly feeling like I might be underperforming, even though I don't have any concrete evidence of that. How do I know if I'm doing well in my current position and might be promotable, or if this is just anxiety?
All right, so I love this question. I like, like I love all your questions and I wanna start by saying, this is a really common thing that I hear from high achieving people early in their careers. So if you're listening and it's resonating with you, my guess is that you're [00:21:00] probably
not underperforming. Okay. That's usually the diagnosis, is that it, Like if you're even thinking about this, if you're even asking the question and caring about your performance, you're probably doing just fine.
I know that that is not gonna be, you know, satisfying as an answer, um, or give you enough evidence that you can use to convince yourself of that.
I'm the type of person who would need like concrete evidence, but that is what my goal is for my answer today. So let's figure that out because like I said, it's me saying you're probably doing just fine, is likely not gonna be enough of an answer for you.
So to start, let's just be clear that the corporate world is not school, and I think it is a lot harder of a transition than people give it credit for.
In school, we have rubrics and grade percentages, a teacher handing papers back with a number on it and comments in the side. The feedback loop is clear and it's quick. Even if it's not always fair, [00:22:00] we generally know where we stand when we're in like high school and, and even in college too.
But in the workforce, especially early career, none of that exists. There's no rubric for excellence. There's no percentage that grades your performance. Performance reviews happen once, maybe twice a year, early in the career, so you don't even know how you're doing until it happens. They're usually vague.
And then in between, you're kind of just hoping that you're doing things well, trying to read your boss's comments, their facial expressions, their body language, and just, you know, you're trying to just show up to meetings on time and hope you're winning. And when we don't have that clear data like we got when we were in school, we naturally just kind of fill those gaps, like the unknown with the worst case scenario.
This is just a typical cognitive distortion. It's called catastrophizing. That's just what we do. We narrate the worst case scenario, and, and that's, that's normal. so before we do [00:23:00] anything, I want you to understand that the ambiguity that you're experiencing. It's real, it's common and it's probably just because workplaces don't give you what you need to self-evaluate in a way that is helpful or meaningful.
Um, or maybe you've never been taught what self-evaluation looks like. You haven't been taught how to collect data that could inform your self evaluation. So that's my goal for what we're gonna talk about today.
So the most important thing that I'm gonna say is the backbone of the answer. Feelings are not data. don't mean that to sound harsh, I'm saying it with compassion. 'cause like I have been in your situation. But hear me out, unless we're talking about a true mental health condition, in which case you know it's medical and I'm not a medical professional, I can either treat nor diagnose medical conditions, period.
But unless we're talking about literal clinical anxiety, general feelings [00:24:00] of anxiety are just a narrative, that's like trying to tell us some story, right? Again, if you have a clinical diagnosis that's different, and then don't take my advice. But when we feel anxious about stuff, it's just, it's just a story our brain is telling us, and the story it tells us is almost always the worst case scenario.
As I was mentioning earlier, um, that's a cognitive distortion called catastrophizing. So the feeling of underperforming is not the same thing as actually underperforming, and it's so important that to stop the spiral, that we separate these two things. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to get out a piece of paper.
All my favorite advice involves like, get out a piece of paper and I want you to answer these questions honestly. I don't want you to just nod along and say like, yeah, I'll, I'll do that, but pause me if that's what you need to do After each of these. Number one, what objective feedback have you actually received from some superior, and I mean actual words from actual humans?
It could be a manager, it could be a co, a colleague or a client. I'll expand it to that. Okay. [00:25:00] Not words that you assumed they meant, not the tone you thought you detected in email, but what was their true, genuine feedback? Number two. Have you missed any deadlines? Not Have you felt stressed about deadlines?
Or not, have you procrastinated and cut it close, but still met the deadlines, but have you actually missed deadlines? Number three, has anyone ever expressed concern about your work? So has your manager pulled you aside for conversation? Have you been left off of something that you feel you should have been included in, maybe 'cause they didn't think you would pull your weight? Has anyone ever said anything to you that indicated there was a problem going on? All right. That was number three. And number four, what are your measurable outputs? Like, are things getting done? Are your projects moving forward? Are people coming back to you with follow-up work?
I mean, obviously it depends on your industry, right? Like are you checking the boxes on your job description? This is different from meeting your deadlines. This is like zooming out a little bit and looking [00:26:00] at all of the stuff that you're working on and that you're responsible for. Are you doing that? Are you moving forward on them?
Now, if you go through these four questions and your answers are neutral to positive, then it sounds like you know, the anxiety you're feeling is, is interpretive. Like that's just how you're interpreting your situation. The story you're telling yourself isn't matching the evidence that you just collected, and that's really important because then you know that you're not having a performance problem, which would require a whole separate set of strategies, which we could talk about if that were really the case.
It's a different problem we're solving, which is like more about recalibrating what you're doing and recalibrating your expectations and your maybe some internal dialogue regulation, things like that.
And something else, Maybe there's a place here for reverse engineering excellence. I love a good reverse engineering strategy. Now, even if your anxiety, again, remember, I just feel like this is really important for me to say. I'm not talking about clinical diagnosed [00:27:00] anxiety. I'm talking about feelings of anxiety. Okay? Even if that's not rooted in reality right now, I don't want you to just white knuckle it until the next performance review.
Because what you're feeling, that ambiguity, that unease that is still real. And me saying like, well, don't worry about it. You collected data so you should be fine. Let it go. Like that's, that's not, that's not very helpful. If someone said that to me, I'd be like, okay. Not helpful at all. You deserve more clarity than you're getting. So let's get that. And I have a strategy for you.
Here's what I want you to do. And this is honestly executive function at a really strategic level. Instead of waiting for your workplace to hand you a rubric, which let's just state the truth, they're not gonna ever do that. I want you to re reverse engineer it yourself.
Go to your manager and ask directly, what does excellent performance look like in this role? And if that feels too harsh or too direct or too on the nose, you can soften it to something like, Hey, what [00:28:00] differentiates someone who's good in this role from someone who's great? Most managers appreciate that question or some version of that question.
As long as you play the context, read the room, insert that question in, you know, not as they're like running out of a meeting. You're like, oh, hey, hey, uh, boss. Just one quick thing. What's excellent? No, you have to like plan it, right? But that signals that you're carrying and that you're thinking beyond just getting by till 5:00 PM.
And it gives them a chance to tell you exactly what they're looking for, and I think that's a win-win for them, and it's a win-win for you. And then two, observe. Look at the people in your organization who are visibly doing well. Who's getting the interesting projects, who's getting asked for their opinion, who's getting promoted? And what are they actually doing? Like what's being recognized? Is it that they're fast? Is it how cleanly and clearly they communicate? Is it that they take initiative without being asked? That's redundant, but you know what I mean. Is it visibility? So are they [00:29:00] just showing up at the right meetings? Are they sending the right updates? Is it the quality of the work that they're producing? Whatever it is, that is the unwritten rubric, and you can learn it if you pay attention.
All right. And then the last thing that I wanna give you is a strategy for tracking your own performance over time, because relying on infrequent, I mean, you said you're like in the, um, first two years of your career, so you might be having bi-annual or like, um, you know, performance reviews every six months.
That's pretty standard. But if they're annual or even if they're every six months, like that's too infrequent and you're relying on those and your own anxiety levels as a way to evaluate performance isn't helpful and it's clearly not working for you, and it's honestly a recipe to just keep producing the same exact feelings that you're currently feeling.
So let's talk about a concept of a personal performance dashboard. I'm not talking about fancy software or anything [00:30:00] like that. I'm just talking about more of a mental structure that you can externalize into some kind of document, like a running note on your phone. Google Doc works just fine. Just it's someplace outside of your head to keep track of a few things. All right?
But this is where you would keep track of the deadlines you're meeting, feedback you're receiving. If it's positive or constructive, you write that down. If it's negative, you write it down. We don't deny that we just got like negative feedback. Write down initiatives you've taken, things that you did without being asked, mistakes you've made either because somebody told you it was a mistake or you realized it yourself, even if you know it went unnoticed.
How did you correct those mistakes? Maybe skills that you have improved or skills that you're committed to improving on going forward. This doesn't even have to be organized at all. It can just be like a running document, like just chronological. Like every time one of these things happens, you just open up the doc and just add to it.
You don't even have to organize it. You could put it into different [00:31:00] categories if some categories kind of reveal themselves over time, but that becomes your personal performance dashboard.
And what this does is over time, it builds you a body of evidence. So when you start spiraling to that like, oh no, I'm probably failing. I'm gonna get fired. I'm not performing the way that I should. You have something to actually push back with and to challenge that catastrophic cognitive distortion, you could say, well, okay, actually in the last three months I have met every deadline.
I've gotten two positive comments from my manager. I flagged a problem, before it became dumpster fire, I am learning how to do X, Y, and Z, whatever it is. And that might be just enough evidence that you need, because sometimes our anxiety is a result of not having enough data. So as I was saying, we kind of just, I don't know, as a way to protect ourselves, somehow fill it in with the worst case scenario.
A related note. If you're not sure how to actually [00:32:00] process and use feedback when you get it, whether it's in the context of a legitimate performance review or in a conversation, I did a whole episode on that. It's episode 37, how to accept feedback and like what to do with it. 'cause receiving feedback is genuinely a skill that is super helpful to have.
I will leave that link in the description, but does that make sense? So like that's another strategy to try, the personal performance dashboard. If you want more details. About how to create a personal performance dashboard, I mean, you could just Google it, get more in depth what I'm talking about here. I didn't make up the concept really, but um, I tried to adjust it for the information that I had based on what you submitted for your question.
Um, in fact, I'm kind of making a mental note to myself right now that that could be the topic of a future episode anyways, but that's something that's just enough to get you started for now.
Okay, so before I let you guys go, I do wanna zoom out for a second 'cause I think there is something that's worth naming that runs [00:33:00] through both of these questions today.
One listener is putting in all of the effort, doing every reading, and annotating and highlighting, still feeling like they're missing something that everybody else is picking up on. And then we have another listener who's getting good reviews. They're hitting their deadlines, but they're still convinced they are failing or maybe not even failing, but underperforming. These are two completely different situations, but I am detecting the same root problem that they're using the wrong internal signal to evaluate their own performance. Remember, feelings are not data and they're most certainly not performance data. Behavior is not the same as comprehension.
Okay? And until we have actual evidence, not like a feeling, not anxiety, not familiarity, we don't actually know where we stand with anything of it. So that's the through line today. Sometimes we need evidence, not emotion.
And if either of these [00:34:00] questions hit close to home for you, I want to point to two episodes.
I've already mentioned these. But I bring 'em up again, they're gonna go really well with what we talked about today. Episode 37 is about how to receive. Feedback, um, and what to do with it. It's not just not along and say, okay, but how to implement the feedback and how to know if it's valid. All that stuff. That is super relevant if you're trying to build that personal performance dashboard and actually use the feedback you're getting.
And then episode 71 is about grad school overload, which I think will resonate with our first listener. Um, or if you're anything like our first listener, if you're just feeling that the demands of, um, a grad program are just a lot, both are linked in the show notes. Okay. Couple quick things before I go.
If you're not subscribed to the Learn and Work Smarter YouTube channel, go do that. If you're not following me on Instagram, come find me. I am at School Habits. I regularly share tips and strategies and tools over there. And if this episode was helpful to you, please share it just by finding the arrow from whatever platform you're on.
Share it with a [00:35:00] student, share it with a parent, share it with a colleague who you think might need to hear it. That is genuinely the best way to help the show grow. And help me keep making free content for you. As always, thank you for your time. Keep showing up. Keep doing the hard work. Keep asking the hard questions and never stop learning.
