Quantifying My Identity

Performance Reviews and Taxes

As you have likely noticed, I like taking stock. I can hardly wait for the end of the year to start making lists of my favorite books and albums of the year. I take time to re-read my journals in late December, and I begin to think about what I want to focus on in the new year. Who am I becoming? What identities am I moving away from? These are not easy questions, but they are meaningful ones.

But there are two year-end tasks that I put off as long as possible - pulling together my tax information and updating my Tippie Action Portal (TAP, for those of you who like acronyms). I start thinking about both of these tasks as soon as the new year arrives. I feel guilty about not even starting for several weeks. And then, as the deadlines loom, I finally use all of my willpower and take the plunge.

This weekend is the weekend. It is tax and TAP weekend. This weekend, I will download our W-2s and 1099s. I will fill out our tax organizer. I will find all the receipts for donations we made in 2025 (many of them in an attempt to restore a little justice in this world). I will hope I haven’t forgotten anything. And this weekend, I will update TAP, the database that the Tippie College of Business uses to track what its employees have done over the past year. I will enter the paper I published, the presentations I gave, the service roles I completed, and the classes I taught. I will hope I haven’t forgotten anything.

Why do I procrastinate on these tasks? I see their importance. Although I sometimes begrudge the money that I send to the federal and state governments, I believe paying taxes is a civic duty. I want good schools, safe roads and bridges, and social safety nets. Since I started filing taxes, my contributions to these social goods have increased with my income. Do I always approve of the ways in which my tax dollars are spent? No. Do I think that the system could be simplified? Definitely. But I still see the value in this yearly task.

Similarly, I know that updating TAP is important. As a former department chair, I remember the challenge of completing dozens of performance reviews on time. Our database system allows supervisors to run reports and compare employees across various productivity metrics. It also provides data to assess productivity at a college level. How many research papers have we published? How often is our research mentioned in the media? How many grant dollars have we brought in?

Because these tasks are important, I am motivated to complete them. Do I procrastinate because I don’t know how to do them? That’s not the problem either. At Culver-Stockton College, I majored in math and accounting. Numbers make sense to me. They are not ambiguous or unruly. I still find joy in filling in the blanks in our tax organizer, tracking my productivity, and lining up decimal points and dollar signs.

I do get anxious that I’ve forgotten something. especially as my memory shows signs of aging. I am reasonably good at tracking my life, but the things I track aren’t the relevant inputs to either of these processes. I can tell you what delighted me in July, what my thoughts about life were last March, what seeds I am nurturing, and what ideas have run their course. But I have to search my files to find how much interest I’ve earned or how many committees I’m on. Maybe this year will be different. Maybe I’ll track the things that I know someone is going to ask me about. But if forced to choose, I’ll continue to focus on delights and seeds.

Even with better systems, I will continue to have a tenuous relationship with these processes. They are processes that are designed to serve the purpose of larger entities - the college, the university, the state, the country. As a result, they simplify what I’ve done over the previous year, quantifying it so that I can be evaluated and assessed. I prefer reflecting, narrating, and leaving room for complexity. It is true that I am married filing jointly, not blind, no longer have dependents, and published one journal article last year. By the end of the weekend, I will have once again documented these facts. And then I will return to sensemaking, looking for the themes in my life and treasuring the moments that cannot be quantified.

Caption: My carpool buddies and I, on our way to work on a random day in November.