Six-Level Model for Reviewing Your Own Work

The Six-Level Model for Reviewing Your Own Work is a framework for seeing work at six altitudes, from current actions on the runway to life purpose above 50,000 feet. Its decisive claim is that a person cannot reliably choose what to do by consulting a single priority list or a long-range vision: immediate actions, projects, areas of responsibility, goals, visions, and purpose shape one another, and must be reviewed as connected layers. The model answers the conditions of knowledge work, where projects have few natural edges, information is abundant, roles keep changing, and commitments can outstrip the mind’s capacity to hold them.

Why Work Requires Multiple Altitudes

The framework begins from a contrast between work with visible boundaries and contemporary projects whose possible completion is difficult to define. Fields could be plowed and boxes packed; the task and its finish were apparent. By contrast, a conference, training program, compensation structure, essay, or reorganization might always be improved, and the Web makes potentially relevant information effectively infinite. The challenge is not simply having too much to do: it is that many projects have no obvious stopping point, while more information can always be recruited in the name of doing them better.

Organizational work compounds this uncertainty. Outcomes increasingly depend on communication and cooperation across divisions, weakening the old separation of office silos and bringing more messages and commitments into view. At the same time, organizations continually change their goals, products, partners, markets, technologies, and owners, with corresponding changes to structures and responsibilities. Professionals also change careers and pursue continuing development. In this setting, what a job entails—and how much input matters to doing it well—may not remain clear for long.

The author describes a culture generating large volumes of both external information and internal ideas and agreements, without having equipped people to manage the resulting commitments. Values and primary outcomes can give work meaning and direction, but they do not simplify the daily workload; they can make the challenge more demanding. What is missing, the book argues, is a coherent system that handles both big-picture thinking and small open details, manages several tiers of priority, controls the daily flow of inputs, and saves more time and effort than it takes to maintain.

The Six Levels

The model names six perspectives, ordered from the immediate to the expansive: Runway, or current actions; 10,000 feet, current projects; 20,000 feet, areas of responsibility; 30,000 feet, one-to-two-year goals; 40,000 feet, a three-to-five-year vision; and 50,000-plus feet, life. The altitude analogy is deliberately practical rather than exact. The levels remind the user that a job is not just a queue of tasks: it includes short-term outcomes, continuing responsibilities, future aims, and an ultimate purpose from which those commitments can derive.

At Runway level are accumulated actions: calls, email responses, errands, and agendas to communicate to a boss or spouse. The book estimates that stopping the world at any one moment could reveal three hundred to five hundred hours of actions waiting to be done. At 10,000 feet are the current projects generating many of those actions—short-term outcomes such as setting up a home computer, organizing a sales conference, moving to a new headquarters, or getting a dentist. These examples make the distinction concrete: an action is something to do, while a project is an outcome that may generate several actions.

Higher levels widen the time horizon and change the character of the questions. At 20,000 feet, areas of responsibility define the ongoing parts of life and work that must be maintained. At 30,000 feet, one-to-two-year goals concern what a person wants to be experiencing across those areas; achieving job objectives may require a shift in emphasis or new responsibilities, while personal goals may increase the importance of some parts of life and diminish others. At 40,000 feet, a three-to-five-year vision brings broader considerations into view, including organizational strategy, environmental trends, career and life transitions, family and financial aims, and changes in technology, globalization, markets, and competition. Decisions at this horizon may alter the shape of work at several levels.

At 50,000-plus feet is life: the big-picture question of why a company exists and why a person exists. Purpose is presented as the core definition of what the work really is, the ultimate job description from which goals, visions, objectives, projects, and actions derive and toward which they lead. The framework therefore does not treat immediate activity as trivial or purpose as decorative. Each is a different altitude of the same body of commitments.

Review, Choice, and the Limits of Priority Setting

The model is introduced as a way to define work before attempting to set priorities. Priorities should guide choices, but the book cautions that familiar priority models are unreliable for much of real work unless a person first knows what that work comprises. Reviewing only one horizon leaves important context out: a busy action list may obscure the projects behind it, while a compelling long-term goal may not identify what can be done next.

The altitude analogy is not a rigid classification scheme. The book acknowledges that real conversations about focus and priorities may not fit precisely into one level. Its value is as a reminder of the multilayered nature of a person’s job and the commitments and tasks that follow from it. Traditional attention to long-term goals and values remains necessary, but does not supply a practical framework for most daily decisions. The model’s broader account of work is intended to connect those decisions to the different levels at which work is experienced.

That connection matters because defining work is an active process, not merely an abstract exercise. Clearing an in-basket, email, voice-mail, and meeting notes, then translating new projects into actionable steps, reveals work that would otherwise remain vague. Processing also identifies quick actions, material to discard or file, and tasks that belong on lists for later. Once the work has been defined, the lists can be trusted as a more complete account of what needs attention; context, time, and energy then help determine which available action is appropriate. The six perspectives add a further question: how does that action relate to the nature, goals, and standards of the work?

Externalizing Thought and Supporting Review

The model’s practicality depends on keeping commitments and ideas in forms that can be revisited. The book compares short-term memory to a computer’s limited RAM: the conscious mind is a focusing tool, not a dependable storage place for every incomplete or undecided matter. With only a few things available to conscious thought at once, unfinished items continue to occupy mental capacity; when that capacity is overloaded, distraction and worry interrupt focus without necessarily producing progress.

External capture helps prevent this burden from remaining solely in the mind. Brainstorming practices such as mind mapping let a person record ideas as they arise and determine later how they fit and what to do with them. For a possible office move, associated thoughts might include computers, business cards, changed connections, furniture, telephones, purging, and packing. The method is not confined to a particular medium: ideas can be placed on sticky notes on a whiteboard or entered into a word processor or outlining program. Capturing an idea when it occurs means it need not be generated again from memory.

This outward movement of thought is described as distributed cognition: ideas are moved from the head into objective, reviewable formats. A remembered lesson from the author’s English teacher gives the principle a physical form. For college papers, the teacher recommended writing notes and quotations on separate three-by-five cards, then spreading the cards on the floor to see the emerging structure and identify what was missing. The cards do more than preserve information; arranged together, they let the writer inspect relationships and gaps from outside the mind.

Tools are useful when people will actually use them to create and review lists. Organizing systems can be paper-based, arranged in notebooks or planners, or digital, and the book emphasizes the value of tools a person enjoys using. The medium matters less than being able to create a list on the run and review it easily and regularly. In this framework, external systems do not replace judgment: they give judgment a dependable, visible set of commitments to work with.

Shared Commitments and the Model’s Significance

The need for dependable review extends beyond individual work. A request or relevant information may arrive by voice-mail, email, conversation, or written note; if the recipient’s system reliably processes only one of those channels, the sender is forced to adapt to that limitation. The book treats such gaps as a threat to coordination: an initiative can be only as dependable as the weakest link in the communication system, and a key person’s dulled responsiveness can become its Achilles’ heel.

Personal systems cannot simply be legislated, but organizations can hold people accountable for outcomes and for tracking what comes their way. The proposed organizational culture accepts that everyone may have more work than can be completed and makes it safe to renegotiate agreements about what will not be done. Such renegotiation requires reliable collection: a forgotten agreement cannot be renegotiated, whether it was made with oneself or with another person. A group that adopts a complete collection standard may therefore operate efficiently without assuming that it is necessarily sailing in the right direction or even on the right ship.

The Six-Level Model for Reviewing Your Own Work joins two kinds of control that are often separated: the external discipline of capturing and organizing open commitments, and the broader perspective needed to judge what those commitments serve. Its levels do not promise that every project will have a natural endpoint, that information will stop arriving, or that priorities will become simple. Instead, they make the different scales of work available for review together. That is how the framework links a call or errand on the runway to a project, a responsibility, a future direction, and ultimately the purpose that gives the work its definition.