Recently, in my organization, they moved from a six-month review cycle to a one-year review cycle. One of the managers asked the question why this change was made. None of the ICs asked this question.

Mostly, these review cycles were moved to an annual period because of the overhead and the work usually comes to a standstill for at least a day as everyone is trying to wordsmith their performance so far.

But I think one of the best ways to do this as an IC (or anyone) is to spend 30 mins on Friday and Monday to see what impactful work we did that week and what impactful work we want to do that week, respectively. Extra points to also write down what is the objective way to measure if that work was impactful.

This ensures that every week is impactful, goal-driven, and not just led by Slack and email ad-hoc work assignments.