The end of each quarter and, especially, year in a company with processes is, of course, terrible. Talk to everyone, agree on goal completion, write an evaluation, come up with new goals, agree on them too, fulfill all bureaucratic requirements. Just exhaled now. 🚬
Being a regular developer I obviously hated all this. This is "not work", work is writing code. Now, however, almost nothing has changed, but I at least started to understand the necessity of this evil. In practice it turns out this is actually the most important thing. This is literally the only way to consistently follow long-term goals.
The processes themselves should be arranged so that once every few months you commit at the level of the entire team and at the level of each developer to some work important for the project. You agree on all this (here it's critically important to have understanding with the person you're agreeing with). And once you've promised to do it, it's quite difficult to bail out, you have to deliver. You spend several months then doing your favorite "work", and at the end of the quarter you already see the fruits. In principle, with regular product sprints this works exactly the same way, just the cycles are smaller in time.
I've had to work in companies where planning was only sprint-based, where planning was only product-based once per release, where there was no planning in principle. And this doesn't work at all, project quality starts to sag. Everyone gets so buried in operations that nobody even remembers about any common technical goals later. In such projects usually everything is held together by the initiative and extra efforts of specific people. However, everything is held together by specific people's initiative everywhere and always, but just there the harmful influence of this is most noticeable.
Specific people with extra efforts are far from everywhere and, honestly, this is a very unreliable thing. They will sooner or later burn out/decide that their pain is misunderstood/underappreciated here and leave. Usually it's a person who by fate ended up as a lead, since leads mostly become those who just don't give a damn.
Setting aside a couple weeks in a quarter to come up with, discuss with everyone and eventually write down a resolution in such scenarios no longer seems like something unnecessary. 🧘