The Good Work Graph is a thought exercise. Why does it exist? For two main reasons:

To help me decide on which professional endeavours are worthy of my attention.

One of my earliest jobs at Oracle was to help a large manufacturing conglomerate print tax reports. While I found the analysis of their country’s tax and economic system fascinating, I did think the impact of my work was small. I was a little bitter, thinking “here I am helping a company print receipts, while my friends at ISRO are exploring the universe”.

As I grew older, I understood that there were many positive secondary effects of my work at Oracle. But I still yearn for jobs where the primary goal of my work is something I appreciate. To ensure that principle translates to action.

We’ve all been taught well. Do good work for your society, have lofty ambitions, use your privilege as a tool. But do these translate into job choices? In my personal experience, no.

Thus, I use the GWG™ to

a) decide if I should take up a new project

b) retrospect on the successes I have achieved in the past

The Framework

CAVEAT: As you might have guessed from the “my” in the title, my GWG™ is highly subjective and you may strongly disagree with it. I encourage you to make your own good work graphs (and then ™ them on your own blog post).

On the X axis — the primary effect of my work on life. Mostly self-explanatory. Saving lives is saving lives. Enriching lives could be delivering any kind of value that makes somebody’s life better. The degree of this obviously varies, this blog post is going to enrich far fewer lives than Plato’s Republic.

The Y axis is slightly trickier. On the top we have exploring ourselves internally — our minds and the civilisation we have created. At the bottom we have exploring everything that was given to us — our bodies, the universe, physics and chemistry, etc.

If a project does not fall anywhere on this graph, it’s not “good” work for me. If a project does, then I should judge its desirability on how far I can push it on the X and Y axes.

The graph above has some examples filled in. This is where things get really subjective. Where would you place the work you are doing on the graph? Where do you think your friend’s start ups figure? This , as always, has been left as an exercise for the reader :)