Use these questions to audit your job and do more of what energizes you
About six years ago I left my amazing job. The people, place, and projects were all great, but I couldn’t help but feel like I needed to make a shift. Nothing was explicitly wrong and I was unclear about the direction I wanted to move in, yet the feeling didn’t go away.
The thing that finally gave me the shove / motivation / clarity I needed to quit my job was an audit. And not just any audit: an energetic audit meant to help shed light on the parts of my job that filled me up, the parts that I could take or leave, and the parts that felt downright dreadful.
Basically, I took an inventory. And you can do the same by grabbing a notebook (or opening a fresh spreadsheet if that’s how your brain works), paying attention, and taking stock of how you spend your time and how it makes you feel.
To guide the journey, consider these questions:
What fills me up?
These are the parts of your work that leave you feeling energized (the things you want more of).
What do I walk away from feeling excited about?
When does time pass quickly without me noticing?
What leaves me feeling more energized when I finish than when I started? (Kind of like a runner’s high — you might be physically tired, but energetically you feel buzzed up.)
What projects do I see being done and think, “I wanna do that — I could really own that!”? What is it about them that I feel drawn to?
What could I take or leave?
These are the parts of your job that you don’t feel strongly about either way. For example, I knew I could keep track of budgets and project timelines, but I didn’t feel like I really wanted to watch over them, and I was happy to turn them over to others to manage.
Am I doing anything that I’m good at but feel indifferent toward? List them.
How much time am I spending on activities that are just so-so?
What do I downright dread?
You might be super skilled at these things, or you might be terrible at them. Either way, doing them leaves you feeling drained in a bad way.
What parts of my job do I wake up feeling dread about doing when they’re on my calendar for the day?
Are there any activities that feel like a slog, or that I always drag my feet on to complete?
What work would I eagerly delegate to someone else if I could?
What’s next?
After taking stock, it’s easy to see which buckets carry more weight. If you find that the mix is heavily skewed toward the “dread” bucket, it’s probably time to make some changes. Or maybe the “dread” bucket is contained, but you really want to be doing more of the things that fill you up.
For me, that meant more workshop facilitation, more leading teams, and more leading strategic meetings, hence my decision to start my own facilitation business. For you, it will look different. Sure, there will probably still be some residual take-it-or-leave-it items, and a couple of strong dislikes even after you make changes, but the idea is to shift the mix toward the activities that energize you.
You can look for ways to move inside your current org, find a different job, or hire someone to work for you. You can actively say “no” to requests that don’t fit into your “energizing” bucket. And every time you consider new work or a new project, check it against your criteria as a way to stay honest about the breakout.
This reigns true if you’re a solopreneur, like me. Someone recently asked me, “how do you say no to things that aren’t quite a right fit?” My answer: Try saying “no” for a period of time so you can carve out space for the work you want to do. The challenge is, if your plate is full of things that are not a great fit, it will be hard to go after things that are the right fit. Plus, you’ll likely be depleted and have less energy because you’re doing things that bog you down instead of things that fill you up. If that feels intimidating, give yourself a deadline of 3–6 months to accept work that meets your ideal criteria before you say “yes” to anything else.
Making change starts first and foremost with being honest about where you’re at so you can envision where you want to go. If you don’t give yourself the space to do the good stuff, then it’ll never land on your plate.
I’m coming up on my six-year anniversary of being a solopreneur running my own business leading Design Sprints and strategic workshops, and I’ve never looked back from the moment I quit my amazing job.
If you’re feeling unfulfilled, stagnant, or are bursting to make a change, this exercise could help steer your next move, like it did for me.