CHAPTER 2

Assessment: Are You Focusing on What’s Important to You?

by Stewart D. Friedman

In this assessment, you’ll compare your priorities with how you actually allocate your time and energy.

There’s an old saw that the urgent often wins over the important. But too much focus on things that aren’t important to you can have significant long-term impact on your career, your family, and your health. The “Four-Way View Test,” adapted from my 2008 book, Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life, gives you an understanding of how you’re focusing your attention on the four domains of your life: work, home, community, and self. It reveals the amount of attention you pay to various aspects of your life and also asks about your satisfaction in each domain.

After taking the assessment, I’ll provide you with some practical guidance on how you can start addressing some of the gaps that you may discover. If followed, this assessment can lead to plans for action that will improve your satisfaction and performance in all domains—to achieve four-way wins.

How to Do It

For the first two questions, assign a percentage to each category, but make sure the four numbers add up to 100%. (So you could have 100% in one area, but 0% in the others.) If you place as much importance or focus as much time and energy on work, career, or school as you do on the other three areas of your life combined, put “50%” in that part of the chart. If, as another example, all four domains are of equal importance to you, then put “25%” for each.

1.Consider the relative importance of each major area of your life today. On a percentage basis, how important is each one of the four areas to you now?

2.Consider how much time and energy you actually focus on each domain in a typical week. On a percentage basis, how much do you focus your attention on each of the four areas?

3.How satisfied are you, currently, in each of the four areas? Indicate your satisfaction, your subjective sense of wellbeing, using a 1 to 10 scale where 1 = not at all satisfied and 10 = fully satisfied.

Diagnostic Questions

Once you’ve completed the assessment, look for gaps between what you say is important and what you focus on (or vice versa), and what the implications are for your level of satisfaction. Think about what your scores mean to you, and consider your responses to the following questions:

1. What are the consequences of the current choices you make about how much you focus on work, home, community, and your private self (that is, your mind, body, and spirit)?
2. What adjustments would you like to make—either in what’s important or in where you focus your attention—to change any of these numbers? Specifically, what action could you take that would improve your satisfaction in all four domains?
3. What would it take to actually make these adjustments in your life?
4. How would these adjustments improve your performance and results at work, at home, in the community, and for your private self?

Getting Started on Improvements

If you see troubling gaps in your charts, don’t panic. It’s actually pretty common. In my experience teaching this topic at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and in companies around the world, I see that most people have opportunities to take constructive action to better connect what they care about with what they do. And by doing so they are likely to improve their satisfaction and performance in all four domains. Our research shows that this doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. The really good news is you can make big progress toward closing these gaps by starting small. One way to get started is to design a few realistic, manageable experiments, as described in chapter 1.

The most fruitful experiments help you make improvements across the four domains. At work, you may want to increase productivity or reduce hidden costs. Goals for home and community may include strengthening relationships and contributing more to social causes. For the private self, they’re usually about becoming healthier and finding greater meaning in life.

How can a single experiment help you check off several—or all—of those boxes? Some experiments improve one domain directly and others indirectly. For example, being more disciplined about your diet will have a direct impact on your health, but it may also give you more energy for your work and raise your self-esteem, which in turn might make you a better parent and friend. Other activities—such as running a half-marathon with your kids to raise funds for a charity sponsored by your company—will feed all four domains simultaneously.

Whether the benefits are direct or indirect, achieving a four-way win is the goal. That’s what makes the changes sustainable: Everyone gains and wants to succeed. Keep in mind that some benefits may be subtle or delayed—long-term career advancements, for instance, or a contact who might ultimately offer valuable connections.

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Stewart D. Friedman is the Professor of Management Practice Emeritus at the Wharton School. The former head of Ford Motor’s Leadership Development Center, he is the author of Leading the Life You Want: Skills for Integrating Work and Life, Baby Bust: New Choices for Men and Women in Work and Family, and Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life. For more, visit www.totalleadership.org, or find him on Twitter @StewFriedman or on LinkedIn.

Adapted from content posted on hbr.org, June 1, 2013.