Asked for a raise outside the normal cycle instead of waiting eight more months, and it actually worked

I'd taken on a chunk of a departing teammate's work with no title change and no comp conversation, and told myself I'd bring it up "at review time." Review time was eight months away. Eventually I just booked 20 minutes with my manager, wrote down the specific things I'd absorbed and what they used to cost the team, and asked directly for a correction, not a favor. Got roughly 70% of what I asked for within a month, backdated. The thing I underestimated was how much writing it down beforehand mattered — saying it out loud cold would have gone very differently.