I’m betting that there’s little, if any, overlap between those two groups.

I used to be in the job description camp, and I was pretty effective. I built stuff, went to meetings, talked to people, got stuff done… I think I did a good job of matching the description. For the last eight months or so, however, I’ve been in the second camp. In lieu of a formal job description, I have specific, measurable goals to accomplish in any given time period. As a result, I can tell you exactly how I’m doing at any given point, and where I need to focus my efforts to get more done.

For freelancers, of course, this is probably an obvious change – when you work for (and substantially by) yourself, your job description is “get everything done,” which means you have to fall back on goals. For employees, however, changing your mindset from a vague prose passage to a set of concrete goals can be a massive shift. It can dramatically improve your effectiveness at your current job – or it could show that you should’ve been doing something different all along.

That said, I’m now trying another. For most of my professional life, my online presence has been centered around the domain culann.com. Given my current career direction, however, I’m resetting all of that – so going forward, culann will turn into more of a personal, microblogging site (and in fact, I’m probably going to move it over to tumblr), and my work life will revolve around this, benscofield.com. Hopefully it won’t be too confusing to longtime (or new!) readers.