How to Write a 5-Minute Self-Evaluation for Work (With Examples)

If your experience is like most people’s, you really only look at your past work when you have to write a cover letter or update your resume. What do I say about myself and why does it matter? How do I even begin to put this together? 

Let’s rewind a bit. You likely spend around 40 hours a week at your “traditional” job. Since you’re an optimal employee (winky face) we know you do great work—on a daily basis. So, why, when it comes to putting together a tight resume or a creative and illustrative cover letter do we draw blanks?

Often, it’s because we let work go by. We come in Monday, keep our heads down, and we take care of business. Before we know it, another year has passed—and we ask ourselves, “Where did the last year go? What even happened?”

Because we weren't keeping track, we have no perspective of our own work, our strengths, our shortcomings, and everything in between.  

In short, we need to slow down for a minute. Here’s our challenge to you: before hightailing it to your next weekend full of hikes, Netflix, and yoga—take a minute to reflect on the week you completed. We've come up with an easy way to conduct a weekly self-evaluation for work on a consistent basis.

By gifting yourself (and your career) regular self-appraisals, you'll be able to take pride in your work, track your work processes, and make your own recommendations for the next year. Yes, you can be your own mentor.

Let's dive into it.

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The Benefits of Self-Evaluations

Besides the fact that a self-evaluation makes it easier to fill out your yearly performance evaluation and be aware of all the great achievements you're making on the regular at work, we've got a few more to keep in mind!

Your 5-Step Weekly Evaluation Practice  

We know, mindfulness is a buzzy word, but it is meaningful. As people—and especially as women—we rarely slow down enough to take in our accomplishments.

It’s our hope that, by taking five minutes on a Friday, you can create and maintain a dedicated time to really look at the week behind you. Take this time to count your wins, your losses, and where you’d like to improve.

So, take out your timer and set it to sixty seconds. Here’s an easy five-step way to summarize your week using this self-evaluation template:

Step One: Celebrate Your Wins (60 Seconds)

This is the most important step, especially when—down the line—you will need to revamp your resume or LinkedIn profile. Get those wins on paper—or else you will forget about them. This isn’t Fight Club, so the rules are reversed. The first rule about a great win is talking about a great win.

Noticing your wins is the first step to actually realizing them. Rather than saying “Well, it is my job” or “It’s not that big of a deal,” take the moment to revel in it. You set a goal and you achieved it.

In addition to documenting your win, insert details about it. If you have specific numbers or metrics you hit, document that. If you built a specific team to overcome an obstacle, include those details and the names of the players involved. Did you reach your sales targets well before the end of a quarter? If you deployed a brand new strategy, write down the dirty details of how you did it. Get specific by pulling analytics, naming the platforms used in your work, or including the specific customer satisfaction quote about your work.

Once you have gathered a few weeks of wins, you will look back. Even if you’re not job searching, this practice is extremely helpful in recognizing patterns that lead to success.

Step Two: Address Your Losses or Weaknesses (60 Seconds)

Just like celebrating wins, recognizing losses or missed targets in your own work is equally important. As painful as they may be, we learn so much from our losses—sometimes we gain more insight from a single failure or weakness than we do from a dozen successes.

Creating this checklist is like ripping off a bandage, so let’s do it quickly. Create two columns:

Did you make a spelling error in an important email to a client? Next time, take those extra two minutes to spellcheck that email. Did you forget to follow up with a colleague about a project? Set daily reminders for check-ins on certain projects. Did you oversleep and come in late on a Tuesday? Make sure you’re getting enough sleep—and maybe skip that third glass of wine over dinner.

If you made it through the week with perfect grammar, no schedule conflicts, exemplary communication, and eight+ hours of sleep a night, you can still spend some time on this section. Instead of communicating a hard loss, spend these 60 seconds on what you’d like to work on—professionally and personally. Maybe it’s your innate fear of public speaking. Maybe it’s working up the confidence to ask for a raise (in which case, maybe you want to spend 120 seconds on step one), or maybe it’s a skill set you want to pick up over the next weeks.

If you don’t see any hard losses, that’s awesome—use this section as a wish list for overcoming any weaknesses you might see.

Step Three: Note Your “Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda” Tasks (60 Seconds)

Here’s a little in-between area to explore.

These are the bullet points from your to-do list that got bumped to the bottom of the list, didn’t get completely fulfilled, or were ignored entirely. These are usually jobs that are a pain to complete, that take you away from your more important job responsibilities, or that you just hate completing. That doesn’t mean they aren’t important to tackle. After all, there’s a reason they showed up on your to-do list in the first place.

There are lots of questions to be asked of these “coulda, woulda, shouldas.” Are these tasks you neglected to the detriment of your week? Or are they tasks better suited for someone else in your department? Did you knowingly neglect to complete this work? Do you regularly put this work off?

For this list, create three columns:

With some of our more annoying tasks at work, sometimes it is best to tackle them first. Everybody has those pesky things they don’t want to do. Once you recognize your “coulda woulda, shoulda” tasks, consider giving them the priority space at the top of your list in the weeks to come.

Step Four: Create Goals for Next Week (60 Seconds)

We’re biased—because we love creating goals—but this is the fun part.

Let’s set the stage. It’s around 3:30 pm on a Friday. You’re itching to get out of work, but you have a few loose ends to tie up and a couple of emails you’re waiting on to close out your week. This really is the perfect time to set some goals.

Here’s the thing about goals. If you don’t set them, you might be lucky to happen upon some success. However, simply by recognizing and setting a goal, you are so much closer to actually achieving it—with purpose. How amazing is that?

Another cool perk about setting goals? You can check back with yourself next week. Did you achieve those goals or did you make progress towards them? What could you continue to do to chase those goals down?

Step Five: Summarize It All in One Sentence (60 Seconds)

Remember how we started out by saying this is all a bit of practice for developing the perfect resume, LinkedIn profile, or cover letter? Well, here is the part where you practice being concise.

Wrap up all your learnings into one or two sentences that can summarize your week. Think of this section as "tweet-length"—and summarize your week in 280 characters or less. Once you've honed in on what's really important, your "weekly tweet" will convey the most crucial takeaways—whether they are positive outcomes or learnings from negative "failures." 

Tips to Follow for Writing an Effective Self-Evaluation

Now that we've given you a 5-step self-evaluation template, let's review some best practices that you'll want to follow as you complete this each week. By following these tips, you'll ensure the information you track each week is useful.

You never know when you might need it next—like when you're ready to ask for your big promotion. 

1. Get Specific With Examples

When you're too vague about your achievements or progress, you lose the attention of the other person. You don't want to lose your boss's attention when you have a big ask prepared. 

Instead, be specific and provide examples. They provide context and highlight your skills, achievements, etc. in ways that add real value to your boss. For example, perhaps you won over a client—and not just because the product you sell is great, but also due to your consistent follow-up strategy.

Success is usually a combination of several factors, and if you're struggling to get more specific or think about examples, brainstorm the following list:

Lastly, you can always use a tool we use in interview prep called story circles to help you think about examples. Once you come up with a few stories, select the ones you want to highlight in your review and elaborate on them with specific examples that illustrate each quality.

2. Use Data to Back Up Your Contributions

Make your contributions really stick by including data points. This works better than just words because numbers create a clear connection between performance and results. Also, most humans find quantitative data easier to understand and digest.

The other benefit of providing specific numbers to back up your results is that they provide you leverage—leverage you can use to get a bonus, ask for a salary raise, or request a hybrid work schedule.

3. Follow a Growth Mindset

Fixed mindsets make you rigid, and in today's career landscape, you have to adapt and be flexible. Success depends on this. When you're doing a self-review each week, check in with yourself. Is your mindset oriented toward growth? What can you do to make sure your mindset doesn't get in the way of your success? Mindset plays an important role in all that we do.

Examples to Use for Your Own Self-Assessment

There are a wide variety of self-evaluation prompts, but we found in our own research that manager's like to focus on a few key themes in performance reviews. We'll use those same themes below to provide a few examples for your weekly self-evaluation.

It's important to only use these examples as inspiration for your own self-evaluation wording. In other words, be sure to personalize your examples with relevant details, metrics, and achievements. Tailor them to what you know matters most to your own manager. 

Example About Achievement:

Wins:

Areas for Improvement:

Example About Collaboration:

Wins:

Areas for Improvement:

Examples About Communication:

Wins:

Areas for Improvement:

In Summary

Maybe some of this sounds pretty obvious. Sure, we agree. But, just like anything, it’s helpful to implement healthy habits around recognition and cognizance at work. By implementing a weekly self-evaluation, you are keeping an important paper trail of your own habits, strengths, weaknesses, and—let’s face it—your own workplace superpowers.

Take the five minutes and try it out. Your entire career will thank you.