Ask a manager what someone has contributed this year and most of what comes back is the last few weeks of it.
What recency bias actually does
Recency bias, sometimes described plainly as "what have you done for me lately," is well documented in performance review research, recent events are easier to recall, so they get weighted far more heavily than a track record built over years, regardless of how real that track record was. A contribution that mattered three years ago is not still doing work for your reputation today. It has quietly become the thing people remember you used to do.
Why this feels unfair and is still true
This is not a claim that the earlier contribution did not matter, or that people are ungrateful. It is a claim about how memory and attention actually work in evaluation settings, whatever is most recent and most visible carries disproportionate weight, and a reputation that is not being actively renewed is, in practical terms, decaying even while the original achievement stays exactly as real as it always was.
Where to start
Treat reputation as something that needs regular, current evidence, not a single deposit that lasts indefinitely. This does not mean manufacturing visibility for its own sake.
It means making sure that what you are actually doing now, not three years ago, is what is legible to the people whose evaluation of you matters, on a rolling basis rather than as a one time case made and then left alone.
Reading how much active renewal a specific reputation actually needs, versus when an older contribution is still genuinely carrying weight, is a judgment worth checking honestly rather than assuming either way. What this gives you is the habit of renewing it on a rolling basis instead of once and done.
There is a specific way to keep a past contribution visible without it reading as living off old work, and it is worth building as a habit rather than a one time push.