Great work holds meaning and inspiration for us personally, and it matters to our organization. Unfortunately sometimes our days get filled up with mediocre or bad work that distracts us from the things we can best contribute.

Here’s a quick 5-minute exercise that you can do to see if you are delivering the great work that only you can contribute:

1. Draw a large square on a piece of paper, and then add lines across to make four quadrants.

2. On the horizontal access write “Things I care about” and on the vertical access write “Things they care about.”

3. In the bottom left quadrant, write “low” and in the bottom right and top left quadrants write “high.”

(See the image to the right for an example.)

Now that you have your 2×2 matrix, think about how you have spent your time over the last week or so and write down 10 tasks/projects that you have worked on. As you think of them, place them in the quadrant that corresponds to how much you and the organization (your boss) care about them. Once you are done, think about these questions:

• In which of these quadrants do the majority of my tasks/projects sit?
• What does this say about the organization’s priorities?
• What does this say about my priorities?
• Am I doing the things that I really care about?

Now that you have done this and given it some thought, sit with these questions and turn them into action steps:

• How can I get more tasks/responsibilities into the top-right box?
• How can I quickly stop doing things in the bottom-left box
• How can I delegate the stuff in the top-left box?