What's your standard for good work performance?

By Chi @ 2023-09-27T16:58 (+25)

A lot of people in the community, including me, are working independently (or have a lot of autonomy, even if they are employed). A lot of people, including me, often feel like they are underperforming or at least wonder if they are. But how do I actually know when I'm not underperforming? I'd like to make some criteria for under which circumstances I'll consider my work satisfactory. I'd be curious to hear what other people would consider "decent" output.

This is obviously hard to define but some types of data that seem helpful:

• How much do you get done in a typical month/half year?
• How much do consider aspirational but realistic to get done in a typical month/half year?
• How much do you consider on the low end but okay to get done in a typical month/half year?
• What kind of output would you want to see out of a researcher/community organiser/other independent worker within a month/half a year to be impressed/not be disappointed? (Assuming this is amount is representative of them)
• What's the minimum output would you want to see out of a researcher/community organiser/other independent worker to be in favour of them getting funding to continue their work?  (Assuming this is amount is representative of them)
• What's the minimum output would you want to see out of your friend to feel good about them continuing their current work? (Assuming this is amount is representative of them)

I literally mean silly things like "X number of substantive research documents of roughly this and that quality" - totally okay if very domain-specific. I know this probably hugely varies from person to person and is hard to answer in general - There's lots to take into account that seems hard to specify like quality of work and often we really care about outcomes instead of outputs. Feel free to rephrase the question in whichever way seems useful to you.

(I know that there is no objective "enough" or that the real measuring stick are my values and reality. (I would have liked to include a link to a post that I'm sure exists but couldn't find it.) And there's a bunch of things that are individual to me and my line of work of course, so I don't expect people to say things that are directly useful and applicable to my situation. But I still think that sometimes a bit of data would be really useful to me and hopefully many others!)