One of the things a good manager does is to recognize and reward people's achievements, especially if people exceeded expectations. A large corporation might have some standard ways to reward good work: a team lunch, movie tickets, gift certificates, days off, reward points, events, and so on. Startups and small businesses might be able to come up with even more creative ways of celebrating success.

In tech, I think good managers take extra care to recognize when people have gone beyond the normal call of duty. It makes sense. Many people earn salaries without overtime pay, might not get a bonus even if they've sacrificed time with family or other discretionary activities, and might not be able to take vacation time easily.

It got me thinking: Now that I'm on my own, how do I want to celebrate achievements–especially when they are a result of tilting the balance towards work?

When I'm freelancing, extra time is paid for, so some reward is there already. I like carving out part of those earnings for my opportunity fund, rewarding my decision-making by giving myself more room to explore.

During a sprint, the extra focus time sometimes comes from reducing my housework. When things relax, then, I like celebrating by cooking good meals, investing in our workflows at home, and picking up the slack.

I also like taking notes so that I can build on those successes. I might not be able to include a lot of details, but having a few memory-hooks is better than not having any.

Sometimes people are really happy with the team's performance, so there's extra good karma. Of the different non-monetary ways that people can show their appreciation within a corporate framework, which ones would I lean towards?

I definitely appreciate slowing down the pace after big deliverables. Sustained concentration is difficult, so it helps to be able to push back if there are too many things on the go.

At work, I like taking time to document lessons learned in more detail. I'd get even more of a kick out of it if other people picked up those notes and did something even cooler with the ideas. That ranks high on my warm-and-fuzzy feeling scale. It can take time for people to have the opportunity to do something similar, but that's okay. Sometimes I hear from people years later, and that's even awesomer.

A testimonial could come in handy, especially if it's on an attributed site like LinkedIn.

But really, it's more about long-term relationships and helping out good people, good teams, and good causes. Since I can choose how much to work and I know that my non-work activities are also valuable, the main reasons I would choose to work more instead of exploring those other interests are:

• I like the people I work with and what they're working on, and I want to support them,
• I'll learn interesting things along the way, and
• It's good to honour commitments and not disrupt plans unnecessarily.

So, theoretically, if we plunged right back into the thick of another project, I didn't get the time to write about stuff, I didn't feel right keeping personal notes (and thus I'll end up forgetting the important parts of the previous project), and no one's allowed to write testimonials, I'd still be okay with good karma – not the quid-pro-quo of transactional favour-swapping, but a general good feeling that might come in handy thirty years from now.

Hmm, this is somewhat related to my reflection on Fit for You – which I thought I'd updated within the last three years, but I guess I hadn't posted that to my blog. Should reflect on that again sometime… Anyway, it's good to put together a “care and feeding” guide for yourself! =)