Reflect
Your job is the wrong unit.
You cannot usefully think about whether your job survives. You can think about what you did last Tuesday.
Why your job is the wrong unit
You cannot think usefully about whether your job survives. It is too big, it means different things to different people, and the question has no available answer. It produces dread and nothing else.
Tasks are a different matter. A task is small, it is specific to you, and you can test it this afternoon. Nobody has to give you permission and nobody has to be told.
The list
Take last week. Not a typical week, not the week you would describe in an interview. Last week. Write down what you actually did in blocks of roughly half an hour, including the meetings, the chasing, the rewriting of other people's work, and the waiting.
Most men get thirty to fifty lines and are surprised by two things: how much of it is not what they think they are paid for, and how much they cannot account for at all.
Do it on paper or in a plain file that belongs to you, not in a company system. This list is for you, and later on it may be the most useful document you own.
Three marks against each line
- A machine already does this adequately. Not perfectly. Adequately, to the standard the person receiving it actually needs.
- A machine does a rough version and I fix it. The fixing is where your skill lives, and it is usually much faster than doing it from nothing.
- This needs somebody in the room. Judgement, relationship, accountability, or a decision that somebody has to own.
Be honest in the first category. Every man overstates how much of his work is category three, because category three is the flattering answer. Test it rather than deciding it. Give the tool a real task from last week, not a demo, and look at what comes back.
The two numbers that matter, and neither is a prediction
What proportion of your week is in category one, and who else in the building knows.
If it is a large proportion and nobody knows, you have time and you are the only one who can use it. If it is a large proportion and your manager has worked it out, your timetable is shorter than you think and it is not yours to set.
Notice that neither number requires anybody to forecast anything. This is the difference between preparing and worrying.
The lines nobody writes down
Go back through the list and add the things you did not count as work. The call where you talked somebody out of a bad decision. The hour you spent knowing, before anybody else, that a number was wrong. The supplier who did you a favour because it was you asking.
These are almost never on the original list, because they do not feel like tasks. They are what you have that is not reproducible, and they are what you will be describing in eighteen months to somebody who has never met you.
What the list is for
Three things. It tells you where to point your own learning, which stops it being a shopping list of courses. It tells you what to protect and grow inside your current job. And if the conversation ever comes, it means you arrive with a document and everybody else arrives with a feeling.
Then take one line from category one and do something about it before Sunday.