Calendar Log for Year in Review

As we look back on 2022 and look ahead to 2023, many of us are conducting year-end reviews, whether those are part of a formal HR process at work or as part of our own personal goal setting routines. This year I added a new part of my professional review process: an annual calendar log.

I recently wrote my annual self-appraisal for our HR process at RingCentral, including highlights of what we accomplished, my contributions to those accomplishments, and data points to validate those results. And to add more detail (not to mention confirming I hadn't forgotten noteworthy things from earlier in the year), I spent a few hours one day going through my 2022 calendar week by week on one screen and logging important items from there in a Google Doc on my other screen. I categorized this list for better clarity, and listed a just-the-facts compilation of my activities for the year in each category. The purpose of this document to inform, not to persuade; let the data speak for itself.

Based on my role, I listed my work activities in six categories:

1. Deal Participation (closed deals). Though my role isn't directly in sales, I work very closely with our sales team and with prospective customers, so our sales results & growth across our whole education team is an important metric to track and report on. I regularly consult with our sales team to help them understand the school district or university's perspective & priorities, fiscal year cycles & budgeting pressures, and how to express the value of the RingCentral platform in the most clear ways for our prospective customers. And, I love working with districts & universities to help them see how RingCentral can be much more than just a replacement for a legacy phone system but can be a strategic enabler to transform their employee & student experience and meaningfully increase student recruitment, improve student retention, and maximize fundraising success.
2. Deal Participation (ongoing opportunities). This look at sales opportunities in progress will likely also be an important category in 2023 and beyond, but it's especially important this year since I was new in my role, and with sales cycles in education typically lasting 6-12 months or longer, I have much more activity in this category than in closed deals for 2022. I anticipate these two categories will be closer to equal in 2023.
3. Strategic Engagement. These are the "big rocks" of my executive activities for the year, which should lead to more brand awareness for RingCentral in education and more sales activity in future years. Some examples from this year include three joint presentations with Arne Duncan (a RingCentral board member and former US Secretary of Education), a significant presence at the EDUCAUSE annual conference, and analyst engagements across a number of global and industry-specific firms.
4. Pipe Gen & Brand Building Activities. These are the "small rocks" in marketing and awareness building. Speaking at webinars, conferences, and association meetings; contributing to email marketing campaigns; generating online content in writing, audio, and video; and more.
5. Customer Engagement. Engaging with our existing customers and advocating for them is really important to me, especially since I used to be one myself. I was able to visit six different customers (one school district and five universities) in person this year, plus a number of others virtually, and I hope to double that number in 2023 and also partner with some of our customers to present at conferences, meetings, and webinars.
6. Deal Participation (lost deals). It's important to learn from opportunities we didn't win this year as well, and looking at them all in a list like this can help other patterns & learnings emerge that may have not been evident in the moment.

These categories work well for my role, but your categories will likely be different. For IT leaders, categories may include executive engagement (participation with cabinet & board), infrastructure performance & reliability, business results enabled by the IT team's work, completed projects, end user support & satisfaction (NPS, one-touch resolution, average time to resolution, etc.), and more.