What to do with the feedback you receive

By now you’ve formulated a feedback request and hopefully sent it out to get someone to comment on your work.

As we’ve discussed in previous steps, getting the feedback information is only one piece of the feedback puzzle. The most important parts await us now.

It’s easy to jump straight into action (or sometimes inaction) when we get feedback information. Comments from someone else about our work can provoke an immediate response in us, and a desire to go and do what we’ve been told. However, when you look at how expert feedback users work with feedback, they tend to have a couple of extra steps before taking direct action (or consciously deciding not to take action).

The first – and probably most neglected – step is to add it to your feedback collection. Don’t have a feedback collection? Don’t worry, it’s easy to start one.

Making a feedback collection

A feedback collection is just somewhere that you store the feedback information you get. It can be as simple as a folder on your computer, a note in a physical notebook, or something you add to your notes app on your phone. If you want, you can use a folder structure or hashtags to organise things – but don’t overdo it. The goal here is to ensure you keep it for later, not to create an elaborate system.

So, you’ve filed away the feedback now, which is great. But how are you going to be sure you see it when you need it? The next step is to figure out when that moment of need is. Will you need to see this again when revising for an exam, working on the next draft of the thing you sent for feedback, or producing the next piece of similar work?

Planning to use your feedback collection

Identify when that moment is, and work on another one of those if-then plans, but this time for revisiting the feedback. You might plan: ‘If it is time to start working on the next draft of the document then I will open the feedback I received on the previous draft and read it top to bottom.’

You can use technology to help support you to follow through with this. There are many ways we can set our devices up to remind us of things, including:

• Making an event in your calendar called ‘Read feedback’ that happens on the day you are meant to start work on the next task, and attaching a file with the feedback to the event
• Using the ‘delayed send’ feature on many popular email tools (e.g. Outlook, Gmail) to send yourself an email in the future with the feedback file
• Putting a reminder in your phone to read the feedback on the day you need to

Doing these steps can ensure you have the feedback you need when you need it. If you make ‘when I receive feedback I will save it in my collection and remind myself to act on it when I need it’ a habit, you will gradually amass a significant body of information from many sources, all targeted at helping you improve.

Reflection

How are you going to keep the information you have, and how are you going to remember to use it when the time is right?

Using what you read in this step, take some concrete steps, and write a post about it below. Include both how you’re going to store your feedback, and how you’ll ensure you look at it when you need it next.