Thursday, June 8th, 2006...9:52 am
Life at 20,000 feet
Today, I want to talk a little bit about the process that I used to come up with my 20,000 ft Areas of Responsibility list. Lately, I have felt that my GTD System was missing some aspects to keeping me as productive as I want to be. It seems that the lack of vertical focus may be the piece that I need to find. David Allen discussed three frameworks in Chapter 9 of Getting Things Done. After reading these descriptions, I chose to try to implement The Six-Level Model for Reviewing Your Work framework into my system.
For a review, it sets its criteria in terms of altitude:
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50,000 ft: Life
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40,000 ft: 3- to 5-year goals
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30,000 ft: 1- to 2-year goals
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20,000 ft: Areas of Responsibilty
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10,000 ft: Current Projects
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Runway: Current Actions
I have a good feel for my next actions and projects, but never really put any serious thought into responsibilities or goals. So, over the last two weeks, I have been trying to formalize these areas in my life.
I started with the Areas of Responsibility in both my personal and professional lives. I got a LOT of help from Patrick Rhone’s Org-Fu Whitepaper that he posted and discussed in the 43Folders boards recently. In the post, he showed how he maps his 20,000 ft areas of responsibility, and I took mine heavily from that (on the personal side).
Michael’s 20,000 ft - Personal Areas of Responsibility
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Relationships
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Julie
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Husband
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Best Friend
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Co-Household Manager
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Financial Manager
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Jacob (3) & Madison (2 mos)
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Father
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Coach
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Care and Feeding
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Healthcare Provider
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Chauffer
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Parents [natural & in-laws]
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Son [in-law]
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Technical Support
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Neighbor in Forest Glen
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Audio-Visual Deacon, University Church
These are my first thoughts at my personal areas of responsibility. When a new one comes up, I will add it to the list and make adjustments further down the tree.
For my professional areas of responsibility, I got a copy of my official job description from our HR department and worked from that. My official title is Computer Services Manager for the City of Northport, Alabama.
Michael’s 20,000 ft - Professional Areas of Responsibility
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Network Administrator
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User Manager
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Backup Administrator
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Asset Manager
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Security Administrator
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Patch Manager
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Desktop Support
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Systems Trainer
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Webmaster, cityofnorthport.org
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Site Maintainer
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Manager [not yet used, as I am a 1-man IT Department]
I feel pretty good about these areas since they are spelled out in a formal document. I have only been in this position since January 2006, and I cannot think of anything that I have done that would not fall outside of these area, which again make me feel pretty good. But again if I run into them, I will add them to the list and work from there.
Now that I have my responsibilities formalized and down on paper, I feel better about working on the next stage: setting goals. I have never attempted goal setting before so this should be pretty interesting. I finished reading 7 Habits last night, and I found a lot of good information in it that I am going to try to apply in my life.
The one thing that I must remember is that these lists are very fluid. I must review them and make necessary changes to keep an accurate picture of my responsibilites. Now I need to figure out how to make sure that everything that I do will fall into one of these areas and coincide with the goals that I have laid out for myself. But that is another post…
- Michael
8 Comments
June 8th, 2006 at 12:59 pm
Thanks for this series of postings, Michael. I’m at very much the same point you are, reading GTD for the 2nd time about 7 months after initial implementation. And feeling the lack of concrete goals at the 20kft+ levels. It is very helpful to see someone else’s ideas posted — the GTD blog world could use more of it.
My question is why separate personal and professional areas of responsibility? I separate personal and professional life at the Projects level, and have some contexts that apply only to work or only to personal life. But from 20kft up, why separate them? I’m still a husband when I’m at work, after all. My suspicion is that this is an artificial division that doesn’t gain anything.
I’ll be interested to see what other people think.
June 9th, 2006 at 7:08 am
Hi,
I mean what Covey is writing about, mission statement et al, do this shortly for each area. Extra-bonus: you will have fewer goals than to cover your needs. Second main function for goal-setting: check out what’s your direction in life. You have millions of choices, which one do you take? Clarify. Have fun!
A good way to create really motivating goals (and that’s one of the 2 main functions of setting one’s goals) I’ve found is to set an life-long end goal for each of these areas of responsibility. Any sub-goal in one of these areas becomes than a milestone to super-happiness… …well, sort of.
June 9th, 2006 at 8:25 am
@Dennis
Your point is well taken. I guess that it is easier NOT to have two separate lists. In essence, it really is one big list, but broken up into personal & professional. True, I am a husband while at work, but I will not probably be accomplishing anything that is related to my husbandry while at work (which is a bad example for me because I work with my wife).
@Chris
That is a good idea. I will look at life-long goals for each area this weekend.
June 11th, 2006 at 9:05 pm
I found FreeMind extremely helpful for planning the Six-Level Model. You can place a shortcut to a saved MindMap file on your desktop so you can open the model for editing with a single click. I used to print it occassionally and put it on my desktop next to my monitor. I accidentally keep looking at it all day. This helps me procrastinating less and makes me feel some kind of inner peace when doing the right kind of tasks, even the long & boring ones.
FreeMind is free software and can be downloaded from http://freemind.sourceforge.net
June 12th, 2006 at 10:33 am
[...] read more [...]
June 12th, 2006 at 11:20 am
@Norbert
I am looking at trying out Freemind. I have never done mindmapping before…there is not a lot of creativity in the IT industry, but what the heck.
June 13th, 2006 at 11:25 am
Just wanted to commend you on a great article and for picking up the hand waving on this subject. Good stuff!
June 15th, 2006 at 11:32 am
@Patrick
Thanks, now I am waiting for you to finish up your Vertical Mapping writeup in your Org-Fu. Yours was the inspiration behind this post.
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