Understanding The Roles And Responsibility In Your Life

Last week I discussed the GTD vertical map (otherwise known as the horizons of focus). In it I mentioned the importance of the 20,000ft level and how understanding your roles and responsibilities influences your map both up and down. In this post I want to take that level and expand upon it further, discussing how I personally define my roles and responsibilities, work out the projects and requirements for them, and how I then monitor my performance.

Roles and 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 moving you towards all you want, then one can confidently assume you are in a positive place. Every action you do in your life can be attributed to a role or responsibility. If you want to get really deep you could imagine one such role as being as a functioning human being on this planet with all the smaller responsibilities that that entails (ranging from being environmentally friendly to socializing effectively with other people).

I find that roles and 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, there are people who 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 and responsibilities to others, such as being a good family member, a parent and friend (note the difference between having an healthy social life that satisfies you and providing the same to others). Perhaps the most significant one, however is your job role (again, there is a distinction between doing well in a career for your own personal growth and making sure the business you work for is successful to satisfy superiors).

How much you choose to actively monitor your roles and responsibilities can be a mixture of necessity and desire. If you feel satisfied with your contribution as a family member (perhaps you visit your parents on a regular basis) it is probably not necessary to track it. However, if for instance a relative 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 viewing your ill relative as a seperate responsibility).

To track my own roles and responsibilities I have created a special template. Each role is split between on-going and one-off goals. The former includes those things that needs to be done on a regular basis (daily or weekly). 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. One-off goals are exactly that and are not likely to be repeated very often (if at all). Taking the health responsibility again, a good example would be booking to see a doctor about my back pain. 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 regularly going to meetings and getting to work on time, yet not acting upon a specific project your boss gives you.

Secondly and perhaps optionally, I created a further template 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  relevant period (I currently judge this period as weekly and do it during my review but this may be too short a timescale for some).