I spent eight hours over the last two weeks updating messaging on a website.
I’ve managed hundreds of website messaging updates in my career by now. But it’s not what my best clients hire me for today or an activity I am passionate about. It just needed to be done, so I did it.
The truth is that I’ve never sat down and decided where I should be spending my time and what activities should come off my plate.
I wanted to see the split of where my time was being spent. So I adapted an exercise from Unique Ability 2.0: Discovery, the book built on Dan Sullivan’s concept, and ran it against my own calendar.
The exercise is simple. You list what you actually did last week, then sort every activity into one of four buckets:
Incompetent and Competent are the easy two. These activities are the work you’re bad or average at.
Excellent activities are those you are great at but you get no real satisfaction from them. In fact, they drain you.
Unique Ability is where superior skill and passion come together. These are the activities you’re great at, you love, and you lose track of time while doing it.
Incompetent and Competent mostly sort themselves out. You dodge the work you’re bad at and hire or persuade someone to help you when you can. These are the first activities everybody thinks to hand off.
Excellent is the bucket of activities where many get tripped up. Being excellent at something often produces more of it.
You deliver, so clients ask again. Then they tell someone else you’re the person for it. Now it’s your reputation, so you get more referrals, so it’s what fills your calendar.
And you never say no. You’re GOOD at it, it pays, and turning down work you can clearly do well feels ridiculous.
Nobody chooses that. It accumulates slowly over time.
That’s the client version of the trap. But when you’re running a solo business there’s a second version. Nobody asked me to rebuild that website. I handed it to myself, for the same reason a client would: It was my website and I was the obvious person for the job. Why would I pay to outsource it?
But when you’re the whole company, you’re also your own worst client.
This is The Excellent Trap. Your time gets spent on activities you’re great at but that drain you. And as a result, less of your time is spent on activities where you have a unique ability.
Gay Hendricks arrived at the same conclusion from a completely different direction. In the book, The Big Leap, he splits your working life into four zones: Incompetence, Competence, Excellence, and Genius. The same four levels and three with the same names.
He’s pretty blunt about which zone does the most damage too. The Zone of Excellence is where highly skilled people produce real results, earn real recognition, and feel quietly unfulfilled for years.
Two frameworks and both point at the same bucket of work.
Here’s what my own two weeks looked like. 209 activities, every one sorted into a box. (Thanks Claude.)
Unique Ability: 36%. Excellent: 36%. Dead even.
That one website project was more than a quarter of the entire Excellent box.
I talked to a consultant last week who’s living in the same box. Four and a half years on his own, and his clients mostly tell him one thing: write some blog posts for us.
He’s good at it. It has paid the bills the whole time. He also told me he doesn’t want to keep going down that road.
So I asked what he’s actually best at. With no hesitation he said, “I love interviewing SMEs. I believe I ask the right questions to get the right answers.”
He came up as a journalist, and it showed. “It sounds geeky to say this, but I love writing data reports.”
Then I asked how much of that he’s done for clients. Almost none. His reason: “I haven’t asked them.”
His Excellent work sold itself for four and a half years and as a result, his Unique Ability work never had a chance to make it onto the menu.
The trap never feels like a problem while it’s happening, because deals are closing and clients are happy with your work. But slowly you begin to feel more and more unfulfilled.
Here’s your challenge for the week:
Draw the four boxes. Go back through last week’s calendar and put every real activity into one of them. (Tip: To make this easier track your time using a tool like Rize.io. 10x Solo members, check out our member discount in the Notion discount library.)
If a large part of your time is spent on Incompetent or Competent activities, get help on those first.
Then, look at the Excellent box. That’s where your biggest trap lies. Start to outsource or hand off these activities and reinvest the time into more of your Unique Ability activities.
Most solos I talk to assume help is out of reach but it’s usually far more affordable than people think. Sometimes you can find a friend whose Unique Ability is the opposite of yours and just trade. (“I’ll do your Excellent activities if you do mine.”)
Usually the biggest barrier isn’t the outsourcing; it’s knowing what should go first. This week’s challenge is what makes that call obvious.
Remember: The goal should be to spend as much time as you can on the work you’re great at and really love.
When you can do that, nobody is ever going to ask you to stop.
Keep building,
Garrett
Just for 10x Solo members:
Last Thursday’s workshop: Alison Simmons on building a CEO dashboard in Notion. Recording’s posted in the Notion library.
This Thursday’s workshop: Lee Densmer on the new ~$35K teaching revenue stream she built this year. Already on your calendar.
In #asks-and-answers: “Does anyone know of a VA service that doesn’t have a 20 hr/wk minimum?” 4 replies
P.S. When you’re ready, here are two ways I can help you:
Join the 10x Solo community. A private community of full-time B2B solos, fractionals, and small agency owners. Weekly workshops, honest peer feedback, and referrals. Apply here.
Work with me 1:1. For maxed-out consultants, fractionals, and agency owners who want to make more money in less time by refining their business model, offers, and systems. A few spots open at a time. DM me to set up a time to chat.
Have questions or comments about today’s topic? Share them below. 👇
The distinction between the Excellent trap and Unique Ability, both being things you're actually good at, is what makes it so hard to notice from the inside. I keep mistaking competence for the right fit, when apparently they're two completely different questions.