TheFocus.Quest

My Quarterly Report — Evaluating my Job

My job satisfaction is in constant flux: some days it feels like it's a good position where I'm learning a lot; other days it feels like a constant swim in overwhelming chaos. Both hold some truth, so I'd like to have a longer term, more systematic way to reflect on it to make better career decisions.

Businesses employ quarterly finance reports to assess the state of the company. I'll use my quarterly report to assess my current job, not just in terms of economic output but also in terms of satisfaction and career boosting.

I won't claim the results to be objective (eww!) because this is far from it, but at least I'll be able to look back to this and reflect on the values I used to evaluate my job —and the results it got.

Index

Report Structure

I don’t want to overcomplicate this, so I’ll just reflect on the following dimensions:

For each of them I will come up with a formula to measure it and produce a score between 0 and 100, where zero means “not good at all!” and 100 means “the greatest value I care about.” Not necessarily a utopian value but one that is good enough that I don’t really care much about progress past that point.

I’ll cap the dimensions’ scores to 100 so no one dimension can have a disproportionate effect on the overall evaluation.

With the exception of money surplus they are all tricky to measure, but I'll do my best to come up with something that reflects reality while still being practical.

Money Surplus

How close do I get to keeping an extra month of life expenses, after the month ends?

This is the closest thing to profit in the traditional sense: the money that I get to keep from my salary after paying for my life expenses.

Formula: ((income - expenses) / expenses) * 100

So, for example: if I earn $10,000 per month and my monthly cost of living is $8,000, that means that I get to keep $2,000 after expenses. The score would be 25 out of 100.

The tricky part of this one is that the score depends on life choices too, not just the job. That's fine because, in the end, how adequate a job is for me depends on my choices and behavior. The job does not exist in isolation, so as my choices and situation change, the adequacy of the job will also change.

What counts as a reasonable expense is subjective to some degree. Some businesses allow employees to expense lavish dinners with clients; others skimp on paperclips. Similarly, some people consider frequent trips to Paris a necessity, while others may see slightly expensive cheese as decadent luxury.

For me, cost of living includes all the basics —housing, food, transportation, medical insurance, medical bills, retirement savings— and a small budget for entertainment. All of these, at the standard of living I am used to.

Job Satisfaction

What percentage of the time I’m at the job do I experience positive emotions?

A risk of using that question is that, for example, a job that provides me with a meh sense of fulfillment 90% of the time would get a nice score. A job that makes me utterly miserable just 15% of the time would also get a passing mark, and there are perhaps other undesirable scenarios that produce good-looking scores.

Memory is imprecise —even more so for emotionally-charged events— so I’ll do my best to come up with a realistic assessment. This being the first quarter I make this kind of report, I don’t have more granular data; for upcoming quarters, I’ll be taking notes every couple of weeks or so.

Skill acquisition

How valuable was this period in terms of acquiring or honing useful skills?

This is hard to convert to a numeric score because of its speculative nature: it’s not just learning that matters, but whether the skills learned will be useful in the future. Alas, I have no crystal ball.

I’ll use a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 means “I learned nothing; it was all repetition of known things” and “I learned a shocking amount of useful things; I’m transformed!”. Simple.

I won’t attempt to produce a formula for this one but when doing the scoring I will to consider things as the shelf life and applicability of the skills. I’ll also do my best to think beyond the technical domain, and consider emotional, communications, and other sorts of lessons learned.

Vitality surplus

Compared to the vitality I invest in the job, how much do I have left to do whatever I want with it?

Finally, I care about having energy left to create and have fun. I’m using “vitality” to refer to a mix of energy and time that I can invest in creative endeavors.

I’ll use a scale from 0 to 100m where 0 means “I have no energy left for creative work outside the job” and 100 means “I can invest just as much energy in my own creative pursuits, as the job requires me”.

This one will be similar to the one for money surplus. Ideally, I want to have the same amount of energy or more to do whatever I want with, than I invest in the job. This is, of course, incompatible with a 40-hour workweek —I just can’t do 80 hours of good creative work per week— but it's a good ideal to strive for.

This one is subjective, too; while money is numeric by nature, creative energy is not.

My Results for Q1 2024

Dimension Score
Money Surplus 30 / 100
Job Satisfaction 50 / 100
Skill Acquisition 70 / 100
Vitality Surplus 30 / 100

Total score: 180 out of 400