Categorizing Your Work

Using the table below, sort the main activities of your job into competitive (work
that directly contributes to your company’s differentiators and capabilities),
competitive-enabling (work that directly supports your company’s differentiators
and capabilities), business-essential (work that keeps things operating efficiently
but doesn’t have to be done better than competitors), and non-essential work
(work that if you weren’t already doing it, you wouldn’t start doing it).

Note that no more than 15% of your role’s tasks should be considered competitive
and no more than 20% competitive-enabling. You may also be in a role that
contains very little competitive work.

Competitive Competitive- Business-Essential Non-Essential

Work Enabling Work Work Work

Ron Carucci, 2019 ©

Categorizing Your Work
Do you feel like you spend sufficient time on your competitive work? Why or why
not? If no, what things prevent you from focusing on those activities?

Which of your competitive activities do you need to spend more time on or get
more proficient at?

Are there any activities in your “necessary” work that if you weren’t already doing
them, you wouldn’t start doing them? How can you phase out those unnecessary
activities to free up capacity for more important (competitive, competitive-
enabling) work?

What would you need from your boss in order to begin shifting your focus in a way
that allowed you to spend more time on higher value (competitive) activities?

Ron Carucci, 2019 ©