Roles & Responsibilities

April 9th 2007

GTD

In last Monday’s post I discussed the vertical map/horizons of focus. I mentioned the importance of the 20,000ft level and how understanding your roles & responsibilities influences your map above and below. In this post I will take this level and expand upon it, discussing how I define my roles & responsibilities, work out the projects and requirements of them, and how I monitor my performance.

Roles & responsibilities determine the quality of your life in the here and now. If you are doing everything you want to do in your life that fulfills all your needs and is at the least moving you towards all your wants then one can assume you are in a comfortable position. Depending on how far you want to take it, you could argue that every action you take in your life can be attributed to a role or responsibility. In an abstract level one can assume that we have a high level role as a functioning human being on this planet with all the responsibilities that that entails.

Roles & responsibilities can be split into two types. Firstly you have responsibilities to yourself, such as your personal growth, your social life and your health. Some can come out of necessity, some can be from choice. For instance, some people are content with a small social life, while others will not feel complete without an extensive network of friends and colleagues.

Secondly there are external roles & responsibilities to others, such as by being a friend, a family member, a parent, and typically the most significant one, to your job role (note the difference between that and career which would be personal growth in your potential field of expertise).

How much you choose to actively monitor your roles & responsibilities can be a mixture of necessity and desire. If you feel satisfied with your contribution as a family member (ie you visit your parents on a regular basis) it is not necessary to track it. If for instance, however, a family member was to become ill and it was down to you to look after that person, your role as a family member would expand and take on new depths as a result (you may even consider your ill relative as a seperate responsibility).

The first template I currently use to manage my roles is this one (A4 size). Each role is split into on-going goals and projects. The former includes those things that needs to be done on a regular basis. If they are not being done then your responsibilities are not being fulfilled. For example, if I have a responsibility to my health, an on-going goal would be to go to the gym regularly. The projects section is essentially your basic 10,000ft GTD project. Taking the health responsibility again, a project would be to book to see a doctor for a check-up. The distinction between these two needs to be clear as they have differing consequences. For example, imagine doing all the basic requirements of your job such as going to meetings, briefings etc yet not acting upon the projects that your superiors give you? Imagine further, doing only what your manager gives you and nothing else regarding your job role?

Secondly and perhaps optionally, I took another feature I came across in Your Best Year Yet by Jinny Ditzler (previously mentioned in my productivity cycle post) and created a further template (A4 size) that allows me to monitor my performance in my respective roles. Write down your roles around the circle at each spoke and judge yourself between 0 and 10. Don’t judge it on amount of effort or time expended because some roles ask more of you than others. Ask yourself if you did as much as you could have done on your role over the period (I currently judge this period as weekly and do it during my review but this may be too short a timescale for some).

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