The form will land some time in the next couple of weeks, if it hasn’t already. Year-end review. There’s a box near the top, there always is, that says something like “summarise your key contributions this year”, and you’ll leave it until the night before, and then you’ll sit there trying to remember what you actually did in March.
Most people fill that box in from memory and a bit of instinct. You pick the three or four things that went well. You write them up generously, which is fine, everybody does, and the slow quarter sort of tucks itself in behind the good one. Your manager does roughly the same thing from their side. Two people, two memories, and a conversation somewhere in the middle that ends with “meets expectations” and a coffee.
Here’s the bit that’s changed. Something else can remember March now.
Microsoft’s own figure, from its Work Trend Index in June 2025, is that the average worker gets 117 emails a day. That number comes out of Microsoft 365 telemetry, so it’s counted off real mailboxes, which I find more unsettling than a survey somehow. Add the Teams chats on top. The meeting invites, the documents with your name in the edit history, the “just following up” you sent to procurement three times in September. Your year has been written down, the whole thing, as it happened, by you. And an assistant like Copilot, switched on inside your firm’s Microsoft 365, can read the lot that you have access to and hand it back to you as a page of bullet points in about the time it takes to make a tea.
For a lot of people that’s quite a frightening page. Most years, for most people, are uneven. A strong quarter, a slow one, a project that went sideways and that you’d quite like everybody to have forgotten. An appraisal used to be a story you told about the year, and stories have room in them. A summary of your sent folder doesn’t have much room in it at all.
There’s a kind of protection in being hard to measure. Plenty of good people have lived inside it for a whole career, doing a decent job that nobody could quite put a number on, and that was fine, because nobody could put a number on anyone else’s either. The ambiguity was doing a lot of work. I’m not sure most of us knew how much.
There’s a test in chapter 14 of the book, the internet-down test: “If the internet was down for a day in the office but you still had to prove you were working, what parts of your job could you actually do?” It’s there to find out what’s left of a job when the tools are taken away. What I keep thinking, going into December, is that this is the same test run backwards. The tools are all on. Everything’s logged. And the question is what they say you did.
The ICO published guidance on monitoring workers in October 2023, and it says, roughly, that if your employer monitors you they have to be open about it and it has to be proportionate. Which is fair enough, and I’d expect most firms to stick to it. But this doesn’t really need monitoring. Nobody installs anything, nobody has to watch you. The record already exists, you made it, mostly without thinking, one email at a time, and the only real question is who asks it something first.
If people are honest with themselves I think measurement frightens them more than automation does, and I think they’re right to be frightened of that one. The automation only ever acts on what’s been measured. It needs the measurement first. And for most of a career the measurement just wasn’t there, so the conversation about whether a role is needed, or whether this person in this role is needed, never quite had anything to stand on. It’s got something now. It’s got a year.
What I’d do, and it isn’t much, is read the year before anybody else does. While it’s still yours to explain. See what’s actually in there, the good bits and the bits you’d tucked in behind them, because somebody’s going to see it eventually and it may as well be you first.
The internet-down test, and a few others, are in chapter 14 of my book, The Next Rung, which Practical Inspiration Publishing bring out in paperback on 19 January. thenextrung.co.
So, ask an assistant with access to your inbox to summarise what you did in October. Then read it the way your boss would.
The Next Rung is a book on how AI is quietly dismantling the middle of knowledge work, and what you can do about it before the market decides for you: pre-order it before it publishes in January.