January is usually the time of the year for doing performance appraisals if you are a manager and after having been an individual contributor for much of my career (I did manage people in most of my projects but never actually had to do their appraisals), I find myself having to go through the whole process of assessing my teams performance. I actually did not have to do much as I took over the team only in October so the previous manager provided the feedback and we generally agreed on the final ratings and I was done with all of this in a day.
But I find myself always questioning the way we do the appraisals in the company I work for. It's not that the process by itself in bad but there seems to be no quantitative input into the rating system at all. People across the company, especially for folks in a delivery role as always assessed purely on subjective/qualitative parameters which I find alarming as there almost always tends to be bias in the ratings.
I agree that it is sometimes difficult to come up with quantitative parameters to judge the performance of those in delivery but I am deeply concerned that no attempt is being made by anyone to actually try and do something about it. I am planning to look through the Internet and see if I can get some insight and apply this for the team I manage this year. We'll see how that goes.
In other matters that seem to be occupying my mind space, the current car I have is into its sixth year and with the family growing I am looking at finally making a jump and buy a sedan but the mind is caught between whether to go for a diesel or a petrol engine and being spoilt for choice as we are, it looks like its going to either be the new Honda City or the VW Vento. The exchange bonus and what the dealer offers for my existing Swift is going to be the clincher and I suspect I can expect nothing from Honda given that the new City has just launched and is seeing huge booking numbers. So I may just end up getting a VW Vento but either way there is going to be a big hole in the pocket.
Funny how we just keep wanting more and more from life when we keep getting financially better off! My list of things that I really cringe for and want include a complete set of lenses and the all new Canon EOS 70D SLR camera, a Macbook, Bose sound system, one of the new fitness tracker gadgets, a new iPad and I calculated that all of this costs almost 3 lakhs....Talk about never being satiated by what we already have!
All the things we read about in the books on being content in life etc etc always seem to be just that...printed material in a book. Maybe I am just no mentally mature to find a point where I look at life and say "Thank you life for giving me everything. I am content!"..How many more countless books and readings is it going to take me to realize I wonder..
Watching Aadrika grow is the best thing in my life right now. Such a pleasure to see your own flesh and blood slowly start talking, make sense out of things. Just an absolute delight.
My 2014 financial plan has some money being allocated for wild life trips and hopefully I will have some money in the bank to make a few trips this year.
My exercise spree to date has lasted just 2 days and a grand total of 60 mins and my plans of doing Sandhi daily were actually executed for about 4 days. Moral of the story? Resolutions always come back to bite me in the ass! I am hopeless at it. Gotta figure out some other way to keep doing some things in life in a consistent manner other than procrastination!
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