Current Work: Awareness
Understand what current work means, what's possible, and where you stand. About 15 minutes.
Your current work dominates your waking life. The average person spends roughly 90,000 hours at work over a lifetime – more time than almost any other single activity.
Yet most people underperform relative to their potential. The average worker is genuinely productive for just 2 hours and 53 minutes of an 8-hour day. Only 21% of employees globally are actively engaged, and 45% report working primarily for pay rather than purpose.
The gap between typical and exceptional is enormous. Top performers in complex roles are up to 800% more productive than average, with the top 5% producing 26% of total output. Flow states – which occupy roughly 5% of working hours for the average person – can nearly double productivity when increased.
Small improvements compound dramatically. Moving from disengaged to engaged, from reactive to intentional, or from competent to skilled can transform both your output and your experience of work.
People approach their working lives for different reasons. This site scores every current work intervention across four core values. Later, you'll set your own weighting across these four values, and the site will rank interventions by how well they deliver on the things you actually care about.
Rewards
The tangible returns you receive for your work – compensation, recognition, status, and career advancement. People who lean towards this value ensure their work delivers fair returns for the effort invested, and actively manage their compensation trajectory.
Competence
Skill and effectiveness at performing your role's core responsibilities. Technical proficiency, consistent quality of output, and the ability to handle increasing complexity. People who lean towards this value focus on mastering the craft of their work and continuously raising their standard.
Engagement
Psychological investment, motivation, and meaning found in daily work. Experiencing flow states, feeling intrinsically motivated, and finding genuine interest in problems. People who lean towards this value seek roles and tasks that align with their strengths and actively shape their work to be absorbing.
Balance
Maintaining sustainable boundaries between work and the rest of life. Manageable hours, predictable schedules, the ability to disconnect, and ensuring work does not crowd out health, relationships, or personal interests. People who lean towards this value protect their non-work life as a deliberate choice.
The Top 0.1% band represents roughly 1 in 1,000 people. To give you a sense of what that looks like for each current work value:
Stewart Butterfield co-founded Flickr and Slack, both of which emerged from failed video game projects. He sold Flickr to Yahoo for an estimated $25 million and built Slack into a company valued at $27.7 billion when Salesforce acquired it in 2021. His career demonstrates how exceptional rewards follow from building things people genuinely need.
Julia Evans is a software engineer known for explaining complex systems concepts with unusual clarity. Her zines, blog posts, and tools have become widely used learning resources across the industry. She exemplifies competence that goes beyond performing a role well – she advances how others understand and practise their craft.
John Carmack has spent decades working at the frontier of real-time graphics and virtual reality, from Doom to Oculus. He is known for sustained, deep focus – often working 60+ hour weeks by choice – and has described programming as the activity he would do regardless of compensation. His engagement is inseparable from his identity.
Jason Fried, co-founder of Basecamp, built a profitable technology company while publicly advocating for 40-hour weeks, no meetings on certain days, and company-wide sabbaticals. He has sustained high performance over two decades while deliberately protecting personal time, and his writing on work-life integration has influenced how thousands of companies operate.
Awareness means knowing your starting point. Answer each question below – some you might know off the top of your head, others might take a few minutes to reflect on.
Rewards
Competence
Engagement
Balance
Your estimated position
Percentiles are estimates based on published population data on work engagement, compensation, and work-life balance among adults. Some items in this area are not scored.
You now understand why current work matters, what different people get out of it, what's achievable, and where you currently stand. The final step is to set your personal value weightings and see which interventions are the best fit for you.
On the interventions page, adjust the sliders to reflect how much you care about rewards, competence, engagement, and balance. The table will re-rank interventions to match your priorities.
Awareness assessment complete
You've built your foundation in Current Work. Your self-assessment and value weightings are saved.
View Your Interventions