As I sit here on my holiday break (no events until 2013!), one of the things I am doing is catching up on writing reviews, and it brings to mind the title question, which a judge asked me recently: How long is too long to wait to write a review?

Cursory discussions I’ve had with random judges would seem to indicate that the average is somewhere between two to four weeks. Anything beyond that is seen as “too long.” But why is there a perceived statute of limitations on reviews?

The overriding sentiment is that reviews lose relevance over time. This seems like a clever excuse for procrastination to become no-actionation. If you have actionable feedback on someone’s performance, it is never too late to deliver it (unless they are no longer a judge). Let’s say you have feedback on the way a judge delivers rulings. You think they are displaying a lack of confidence through their body language and this is resulting in more frequent appeals. You should let them know this whether it is two weeks later or two months later, because until someone does tell them, they are going to continue to get appealed due to their body language.

If you’ve already delivered the feedback in person, that’s great! Face-to-face should be the preferred method of feedbacking. In that case, the lateness of a review being entered should matter even less, as you are doing so primarily as a reminder of the feedback you’ve already given. Secondarily, you can clarify some points, add links to articles on the things you discussed, and generally clean up your thoughts.

Another good method is to combine feedback from multiple events. This is obviously useful with local judges who you see on a regular basis. If you’ve got a judge candidate that you’ve been mentoring at FNM for the last few months, you might want to compile relevant feedback over the course of that period and enter a single review. It might also be useful to enter reviews at milestone points, like the first time they are the official Head Judge. I’ve often had notes from a previous event that I have tacked onto a review. I even had one review that managed to amalgamate three separate events over a 9-month span.

The real issue with waiting so long to write a review is not that the feedback you give will be less relevant, but that you won’t be able to remember enough details. If your memory is ironclad or your notes are detailed, there should be no problems at all with writing a review many weeks after the event. To get around the memory issue, taking good notes is a must, but I also find it useful to review those notes after the event. I’ve sometimes found that my handwriting can be incomprehensible even to myself, or that I don’t understand the abbreviations I’ve used. The sooner that I look over my notes, the better chance I have of being able to decipher them. I also like to transcribe my notes into a Word document as a kind of rough draft of a review where I expand on some of the thoughts in my notes.

With late reviews, it’s always a good idea to give your subject a heads up that it is coming. I usually ship a draft to the subject via e-mail. This serves several purposes:

a) keep the subject from feeling ambushed by the review.

b) allow me to reconfirm details with the subject.

c) see if any of the points in the review have been addressed in the intervening period.

I don’t know what the longest time is for me between an event and a review. Rough estimate, I would say at least six months. Personal friend of the program David Zimet has told me a story about entering a review one year after an event! I’ll see if I can get him to share that tale with you all.

Feedback never dies. At least as long as the feedback is relevant. Don’t be afraid to enter a review just because it’s been “too long.”

Riki Hayashi

Regional Judge

Blacksburg, Virginia, USA