Every Responsibility is a Role

There’s no way to sugarcoat this, but everything of any importance you do is fulfilling a role.

You need to take ownership of a project. You now have a role to fulfill as the owner of that project.

You’ve been promoted to leadership of a team. You now have a role as that team’s leader.

That leadership may have several other responsibilities: Mentorship, Spokesman, Internal Marketing, etc. Each of those is a role.

The inverse, unfortunately, is also true. While it’s productive to be involved with your family, and that comes with many roles, being a couch potato is a very important role…that you don’t want to play except when very consciously knowing what you aren’t doing while vegging out.

I won’t fill this post with fluff.

Every task is best done by a particular version of yourself. Most of these are accessed automatically. Most of them are grouped together in a way that supports maintaining the same role or makes role-switching easy.

But some tasks/groups of tasks–often the 20% that will create 80% of our results–require consciously knowing what we’re stepping into, and deciding beforehand how we’re going to fulfill that role.

Predetermine how you will approach a task or group of tasks. It’s like football players understanding their roles in any particular play. Plan what you’re supposed to do, even if, just as in football, the play explodes in your face. Knowing your duty and working to fulfill it will keep you focused and moving in the right direction no matter what happens.