Background

To be able to do our best work and live up to our individual excellence, we need to match company priorities and projects to individual talents and relative strengths. To maximize performance and achieve more output in less time, we need to have as many team members at any given time operating in their Zone of Genius.

Zones of Impact

What are the Zones of Impact? Great question. There are four zones of work:

  1. Zone of Friction.
    1. Zone of Friction are the things that other people probably do better than you (e.g. fix your car).
  2. Zone of Competence.
    1. Zone of Competence are the things that you do just fine, but others are as good as you (e.g. clean your bathroom).
  3. Zone of Excellence.
    1. Zone of Excellence are the things that you do better than others, but don’t love doing.  This is the danger zone.  Many people will want you to keep doing these things (as those people derive benefit from you doing them), but this is an area that you should also look to move away from. This is the hard one!
  4. Zone of Genius.
    1. Zone of Genius are the things that you are uniquely good at in the world, and that you love to do, so much so that time and space likely disappear when you do them. You are in a flow state. This is where you can add most value to the world and yourself.  This is where you should be driving toward spending most, if not all, of your time.

How do I find my Zones?

To find your Zones, you need to reflect on what you are both uniquely good at and give you energy.

It is important to maximize your energy. You perform best when you are doing things that energize you. Your goal should be to spend most of your time (75-80%) doing things that energize you. If you do, magic will occur.

Here’s how to find your Zone of Genius. This activity should take less than 30 minutes.

  1. Start with an Energy Audit. Look at the last month (or several months) of your calendar and go through each workday hour-by-hour. Go through the last month (or several months) of your to-do list item-by-item. Ask yourself, “did that activity give me energy or drain my energy?”
  2. Then, in a document, put each hour or item in one of two columns: an activity that gave you energy, or an activity that drained your energy. There are no neutrals; every hour or item must be marked as one or the other.
  3. When finished, look for patterns of where and how your energy is drained and where and how your energy is increased. Write down the patterns of the types of activities that give you energy and the types of activities that drain energy.
  4. Now that you have established patterns of the types of activities that give you energy, you have done half the work of finding your Zone of Genius. The last thing to do is to look through the “patterns list” of activities that give you energy and determine which of those activities you are uniquely good at. You probably have a pretty good idea, but if you aren’t sure what you are and aren’t good at, ask the people you work most closely with what they think you are best at. Worst case, you’ll get a compliment! There can be multiple types of activities in your Zone of Genius.

Congrats, you have found your Zone of Genius! Let’s maximize the time you spend doing that.

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Note: if you’d like to take a quiz at the end of this to “verify” or expand upon your Zone of Genius areas, this one is great: https://high5test.com/

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Conclusion

Some people worry that if each of us operates solely in our Zone of Genius that no one will be available to do the un-fun stuff.  This is a false fear. There are many personality types.  For every activity that feels un-fun to you, there is someone out there who not only excels at it but loves it.