How to Prepare Your Year‑End Evaluation in 15 Seconds

 If you’ve ever sat down to write a year‑end evaluation and realized you can’t remember what you accomplished in March — or even last week — you’re not alone. Most of us don’t struggle with performance; we struggle with tracking our performance. Our work gets spread across emails, chats, meeting notes, files, and quick decisions we make during busy days. By December, the story is strong… but the details are scattered.

And scattered information is the quiet crippler of every business, from tiny mom‑and‑pop shops to massive corporations. It hides wins, blurs impact, and forces people to spend hours reconstructing what really happened during the year.

Fortunately, there’s an easier way.

Before we get to the method, let me tell you a story.

Grant’s Auction and the Missing Inventory

My neighbor Grant is one of those classic Midwestern farmers who can fix anything with baling wire and stubbornness. Over the years he collected tools, parts, attachments, rescued machinery, and homemade contraptions that only he fully understood. His sheds were full of things he planned to repair “when the weather breaks,” and his kids had helped him haul home many of the pieces.

But when Grant decided he was officially calling it quits — because he and his wife, Sally, wanted to enjoy full weekends at the casino without worrying about what might break back home — they agreed it was time for a big farm auction.

The problem?
Grant’s kids remembered some of what he had tucked away, but not all of it. Not even close. Some drawers hadn’t been opened in ten years. There were boxes of bolts they carried into the shed but couldn’t describe now. And then there were the “mystery projects” Grant welded together over the years that no one could identify.

Everyone knew the pieces… but no one had a complete inventory.

Now imagine a tool that could walk the entire property, open every drawer, look under every tarp, identify every part and implement, explain what each thing was for, assign value, and lay it all out in a clean, understandable list — and imagine that this tool could do it in fifteen seconds.

That is exactly what Copilot can do for your work year.

The 15‑Second Evaluation Trick

Your work isn’t unclear. Your accomplishments aren’t missing. Your value isn’t in question.
It’s just scattered — the same way Grant’s inventory was scattered.

Copilot can pull all of that together instantly with one simple prompt. Here’s the version that consistently produces the strongest results:

“Copilot, create a concise summary of my work for the past year. Focus on the problems I solved, the decisions I made, the opportunities I seized, and the milestones I reached. Pull from my emails, chats, meeting notes, and files. Organize the results into clean, skimmable sections and, for each item, include the impact, relevant dates or metrics, the related project or initiative, and the client or stakeholder involved. Then analyze my performance: highlight likely bottlenecks, missed opportunities, or blind spots, and recommend habits or systems that would help me improve next year.”

In less than fifteen seconds, Copilot can produce a clear, accurate narrative of your year that would normally take hours of digging to create.

The First Pass Will Be 80% Right — and That’s the Point

When you run this prompt, Copilot will usually give you a strong first draft. It will surface wins you forgot about, decisions that mattered, and opportunities you stepped into. But because your work is spread across so many sources, the first version may miss a detail or two — usually things like client attribution or project grouping.

That’s where the conversation begins.

Copilot isn’t a one‑time Google search; it’s a dialogue.
If something is missing, you simply ask for it:

“Great start. Now revise this to add the client or stakeholder for each item and group the summary by client first and then by the four categories.”

In a few seconds, it restructures the entire summary.

And now you have something you can confidently present to your manager, your CEO, your board — or use for your own weekly and quarterly reviews.

Using Copilot Like a Productivity Coach

Once your summary is complete, you can take things even further. Ask Copilot to help you spot patterns hiding across your year:

• Where did work tend to bottleneck?
• What tasks consistently took longer than expected?
• Which clients or stakeholders required the most follow‑up?
• What opportunities appeared repeatedly but didn’t get fully developed?
• And what habits or systems would strengthen your performance next year?

Copilot isn’t judging you — it’s simply looking for recognizable patterns in your work the same way a productivity coach would. The result is clarity, not criticism, and that clarity can redefine how you plan the year ahead.

Declare War on Scattered Information

If there’s one theme worth carrying into 2026, it’s this:
Declare war on scattered information.

Not through rigid discipline or complicated systems, but by building a habit of asking Copilot to gather, summarize, connect, and clarify your work. The clearer your information, the clearer your performance. And the clearer your performance, the clearer your value.

If you know someone who’s preparing a year‑end review — or who manages people — share this with them. It might save them days of work and help them finally see the full story of their year.