Doing our best work requires us to pay attention to the things and people that energise us.

One way to do this is to consider categorising potential opportunities, projects or clients into three buckets. Always, sometimes and never.

The goal is to do more of the ‘always’ work, on the projects that both energise us and serve our mission. The ‘sometimes’ work may be taking us closer to our goals even if it isn’t in our zone of genius. And the ‘never’ work is that work that sucks our time and energy—the projects or tasks we should either avoid or delegate if they are essential.

It’s true that how we spend our days is how we end up spending our lives. We can deliberately choose to spend them wisely.

Image by Clark Young