Types and Properties of Jobs

This file is the canonical reference for the taxonomy of Jobs. It covers the properties every Job carries on multiple axes (participation in the Critical Chain of Jobs, frequency, conscious / unconscious). It also covers the types a Job is categorically assigned to (Regular, Orientation, Tax, Fake, Emotional, Viral). The taxonomy is a diagnostic instrument. It routes the team to the right mechanic and separates Jobs worth investing in from Jobs that drain effort.

It sits on top of Job Structure (the eight elements of a single Job) and feeds Critical Chain of Jobs (where the customer walks the chain). It connects to Behaviour Change, Value Creation, and Subtraction.

1. Properties and types are different axes — both diagnostic, both used together

A property is a dimension every Job can carry at the same time. A single Job sits in a Critical Chain of Jobs, recurs at a specific frequency, and is either conscious or unconscious to the customer, all at once. Each property is concrete: a specific chain leading to a specific higher-level Job, a specific frequency, conscious or unconscious for a specific segment. Each property points at a specific kind of leverage.

A type is a categorical role the Job plays in the customer's day. There are six mutually exclusive types, and a single Job is exactly one of them. It is not one Job wearing several:

• Regular — the planned, voluntary baseline (§5).
• Orientation — choose which way to perform the higher-level Job (§6).
• Tax — unplanned work forced by a chain-break elsewhere (§7).
• Fake — a future fantasy never performed in the past (§8).
• Emotional — the expected outcome is a feeling: I want to feel confident; I want to stop feeling anxious (§10).
• Viral — performed for or with another person (§9).

These are different Jobs, not one Job changing type. Each Job is typed by its most defining feature. A feeling-outcome makes it Emotional, a second-person beneficiary makes it Viral. That defining feature wins over the situational role the Job would otherwise read as.

Operational consequences:

• Read every named Job at both axes. "Order groceries" for the weekly planner is a Regular Job, with a property profile (in the chain to "feed the family this week" + ~50×/year + usually conscious). The same grocery situation spawns other Jobs, each exactly one type. There is an Orientation Job (compare Instacart, Amazon Fresh, and DoorDash) for the first-timer. There is a Tax Job (re-shop the ruined order myself) when delivery fails. There is an Emotional Job when the wanted outcome is the feeling "stop feeling anxious my dad has no food at home." There is a Viral Job when it's ordered for a parent in another city. Read each on both axes; the strategy move follows from its profile.

Part I — Job Properties

2. Critical Chain of Jobs participation — read on the chain axis; the thesis lives in critical-chain.md

A Job's critical-chain participation is one of the axes you read it on (§1). It names which Critical Chain of Jobs the Job sits in, and to which higher-level Job. The thesis itself is critical-chain material. Benefit lands at the end of the chain, where earlier Jobs are pure cost and only the last few deliver the result. So the dominant move on any chain-participating Job is to kill the earlier Jobs or move up a level. Full treatment in Critical Chain of Jobs §1–§5 (chain structure, value-at-the-end, the cascade when a chain breaks) and Value Creation §14 (kill-a-Job, move-up-a-level).

3. Frequency — how often the Job is performed sets the unit economics of the business

Frequency is the rate at which the same Job recurs in the customer's life — daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. An Instacart customer who orders weekly performs the same Job ~50×/year. A home-buyer performs "buy a home" ~3×/lifetime. Same person, two Jobs, two-orders-of-magnitude different frequency.

Frequency stacks with critical-chain participation. The Instacart Job participates in a chain and recurs at high frequency. Most operationally interesting Jobs carry both properties. The chain's own structure (sequential vs parallel siblings, breaks, cycles) is treated in Critical Chain of Jobs §1–§2.

Operational consequences:

• If your business model rewards cohorts (subscriptions, marketplaces, repeat purchase), the segments worth competing for are the ones whose focus Jobs are more frequent on average. Frequency is a primary driver of LTV. A Job that pays $20 × 50×/year compounds into very different unit economics than a Job that pays $200 × 3×/lifetime, even at a 10×-smaller ticket. It feeds the unit-econ link of the cause-and-effect chain to profit (AJTBD key theses §14).
• Some Jobs that look low-frequency at the individual level are high-frequency at a different segmentation cut. "Move to a new city" fires ~3×/lifetime for an individual but ~200×/year for a corporate relocation department. Which side of the frequency split you stand on is a segmentation choice (see Segmentation), not a fixed property of the verb.

4. Awareness — every Job is either conscious or unconscious

conscious / unconscious marks whether the customer can accurately recognize the Job they are performing. A person can perform a Job without consciously knowing that this is the Job being performed. This is a property, not a type. Regular, Orientation, Tax, Fake, Emotional, and Viral Jobs can each be conscious or unconscious.

conscious means the customer can accurately name the Job. They can describe State A, expected State B, success criteria, tradeoff, and why it matters.

unconscious means the Job is visible in behavior before it is visible in language. It shows up through repeated behavior, spending, time investment, avoidance, contradictions, emotional spikes, or failed attempts to change.

Many important Jobs are clear in behavior before they are clear in language. Status, identity, attachment, control, safety, and trauma-shaped Jobs are often unconscious. The customer may tell a coherent story, but the stronger evidence is what they repeatedly do, what they pay for, what they avoid, and where emotion spikes.

Operational consequences:

• Do not ask customers to name their needs. The need or higher-level Job their behavior serves is often unconscious (see Scientific Foundations §10). Ask about concrete past behavior, recent situations, tradeoffs, emotional spikes, and what changed after the Solution was used.
• Treat self-report as one signal, not the source of truth. A customer can honestly say "I bought Peloton for fitness" while the stronger Big Job is "feel like the kind of person who has their life together." Validate against repeated behavior, paid commitment, avoided alternatives, and the Job Graph around the purchase. The explanation is an input to test, not the conclusion.

Part II — Job Types

5. Regular Job — the planned, voluntary baseline

A Regular Job is the customer's planned, voluntary performance of a Job. They do it of their own free will, they want to do it, and it fits their current Job Graph without visible conflict. Wash the dishes. Take a 30-minute nap. Brush teeth. Eat dinner. Write the weekly status report. Most Jobs in a customer's day are Regular Jobs. They are the structural baseline against which Orientation, Tax, and Fake are defined. A Regular Job can still carry negative emotions in State A and positive emotions in State B. Regular names the performance mode, not the emotional content.

Operational consequences:

• Regular Jobs are where the Solution's core value delivery runs. Activation, retention, and the steady-state Aha Moments all fire here. The product's day-to-day work is performing Regular Jobs reliably enough that they stay Regular.

6. Orientation Job — update the Consideration Set, choose a Solution, lock the lower graph

An Orientation Job is performed to update the customer's knowledge of the Solutions available for a higher-level Job, and then to choose one. The verbs that mark an Orientation Job: understand, find out, find, choose, figure out, decide between, research, compare. Every Job whose primary verb is one of those is structurally an Orientation Job.

Worked example. A customer moving from Boston to San Francisco has never moved cross-country before. Underneath the Big Job "settle into life in San Francisco," Orientation Jobs fire sequentially:

1. Figure out where I'll live. Discovers the options (sublet, lease, buy, stay with friends, extended-stay hotel).
2. Choose: lease an apartment. The chosen Solution jumps up into the Big Job above and locks the downstream Job Graph from that point.
3. Figure out how to find an apartment to lease. A new Orientation Job appears under the just-chosen Solution and discovers the next options (Zillow, Apartments.com, a real-estate broker, Craigslist, the company's relocation contact).
4. Choose: search Zillow plus a broker. The Solution again jumps up, and the next Orientation Job appears below.

Orientation Jobs are how the Job Graph grows beneath a customer who is performing a higher-level Job for the first time. With each chosen Solution, a new layer of Orientation Jobs fires underneath. The process recurses until the customer reaches Micro Jobs they already know how to perform.

Operational consequence:

• Marketing, sales, and content land hardest when the customer is already inside an Orientation Job. They are most receptive to Consideration Activators then, so the same message costs far less to land than at steady-state habit (Behaviour Change §11). But they also work outside one. Loading Consideration Activators can itself wake an Orientation Job, so you can be the trigger (Behaviour Change §8, Job Structure §6). Cheapest of all is timing outreach to a window already firing — Critical Chain of Jobs breaks, life events, Problems with the current Solution (see Critical Chain of Jobs §6; §4 unpacks the Big-Job-stays-Solution-changes dynamic that follows).

7. Tax Job — unplanned work the customer pays because the Solution they hired screwed up

A Tax Job is a Job the customer never planned to perform, and now has to, because the Solution hired for a different Job in the chain failed. Operationally, a Tax Job is the customer-side consequence of a Critical Chain of Jobs break (see Critical Chain of Jobs §5). The Solution promised to perform Job N in the chain. It didn't. The higher-level Job is important enough that the customer pays the Tax Job to get the result anyway.

Worked example — cross-country move. A customer hires a moving company to relocate from New York to Los Angeles. The movers pack the apartment, drive the truck across the country, and unload. Then they dump several hundred pounds of boxes on the sidewalk in the rain, refusing to carry them up to the third-floor walk-up. Carry every box up three flights tonight is now a Tax Job. The customer never planned to do it, would gladly have paid an extra $100 had the movers offered, and now does it anyway. The alternative (boxes on the sidewalk overnight) breaks the higher-level Job "settle into the new apartment by Sunday night."

A Tax Job produces a Negative Prediction Error. The customer arrived with a prediction ("the movers will deliver to the apartment door"). Reality fell below the prediction ("they dumped it on the curb"). The brain registers the gap as irritation, anger, and a teaching signal: "this Solution performs the Big Job worse than I predicted; avoid it next time." The Tax Job is the structural consequence of the chain-break. The Negative Prediction Error is the brain-side signal, and the Problem is its customer-experience side. See Value Creation §5–§7 and Behaviour Change §7 for the predict-and-compare mechanism behind this.

Operational consequences:

• Tax Jobs are toxic to retention disproportionately to their size. The brain's negative-learning rate runs faster than its positive-learning rate (loss aversion; see Value Creation §7). A single Tax Job can undo months of Regular-Job-quality Solution performance.
• A Tax Job is a behavior-change trigger. The customer launches an Orientation Job ("who else does this without dumping boxes on the curb?") and becomes receptive to a competitor's Consideration Activators. This is the canonical acquisition window for a chain-completing competitor (see Critical Chain of Jobs §6).
• The fix for a Tax Job is to perform the broken Job, not to apologize for it. A discount, a refund, a written sorry — none of these perform the Job. Take the Job off the customer (the Take the Job off the customer mechanic — Value-Creation Mechanics), repair the chain in place (the Fix the Problems mechanic), or route the Job to a partner who will reliably perform it (the Route the broken Job to a recommended partner mechanic — Critical Chain of Jobs §8).

8. Fake Job — the customer's fantasy about the future, never performed in the past

A Fake Job is the customer's fantasy about a future Job they say they'll perform, but have never performed in the past. "I'll learn Spanish someday." "I'll lose 30 pounds." "I'll apply to business school." "I'll start running." Each is a future-tense assertion the customer has not, at any point, demonstrated commitment to with money, time, or attention.

The diagnostic question: "In the past, have you done anything to {expected outcome}?" If the answer is no — paid no money, spent no time, invested no energy — the Job is Fake with high probability. Future-tense intent without past-tense commitment is not a Job; it is a fantasy.

Operational consequences:

• Designing a product for Fake Jobs is among the most expensive errors in product work. The Job looks like a real segment (interviews land on real "I want to learn Spanish" answers), it sizes plausibly in a market study, and it converts at near zero, because the customer was never going to act. The cost compounds: weeks of build against a hypothesis that returns negative evidence.
• The recruitment rule that prevents Fake-Job research is to study only customers who paid (or invested significant time or energy) in the past. Past investment is the cheapest reliable filter against Fake Jobs in one pass (see AJTBD key theses §15, Riskiest Assumption Test §2).
• A Big Job above a Fake Job is often a real Job at a different level. The customer who says "I'll learn Spanish" but has never opened Duolingo may still have a real Big Job "feel at home when I visit my partner's family in Mexico City." Climb up; the real Job is rarely at the verb the customer first names.

9. Viral Job — performed for or with another person; may bring free customers

A Viral Job is one a customer performs for another person or with another person. Order an Uber for the kids' soccer pickup. Buy a gift on Amazon for a spouse. Buy Coursera Enterprise for the team. Run a Zoom call with a client. Record a Loom for stakeholders. Build slides in Figma to present to a class. Each carries the same structure: one customer hires the Solution, but a second (or third, or twentieth) person experiences the Solution as a side effect.

Viral is a categorical type defined by who the Job is for. What types a Job as Viral is the second person who experiences the Solution because the buyer performs it for or with them. The defining feature is the beneficiary, not the motivational mode behind the act. When a Job is performed for another person, that beneficiary is its defining feature, and it is typed Viral over the situational role it would otherwise read as.

Not every Viral Job produces virality at the same rate. The operational criterion: does performing this Job by one person cause additional people to start performing their own Jobs with our Solution? Ordering a single Uber ride for a friend doesn't necessarily turn the friend into an Uber rider. Building slides in Figma for a class lets every student see what Figma does. It fires an Orientation Job in some fraction of them ("could I make my own decks like this?"), and a portion installs Figma. The second pattern is what makes a Viral Job operationally viral.

Operational consequences:

• A product can be built entirely around Viral Jobs — Figma, Miro, Google Docs, Notion, Slack, Loom. The Viral Job is the focus Core Job, and the free customers it produces underwrite the acquisition cost of the paying ones. The product surface is deliberately designed so that being seen using it is itself a value-delivery moment for the observer.
• When entering a market, prioritize segments whose Job Graph contains the most Viral Jobs performed at the highest frequency. Teachers, consultants, agencies, content creators, and engineering managers consistently rank near the top of this list, because their Core Jobs are inherently performed in front of audiences.

10. Emotional Job — avoid a State-A negative emotion or approach a State-B positive emotion

An Emotional Job is a Job whose expected outcome is an emotion shift. The grammar is still a Job: "I want to stop feeling anxious," "I want to stop feeling afraid," "I want to stop feeling ashamed," "I want to feel calm," "I want to feel safe," "I want to feel proud." Emotional Jobs are not vague "emotional dimensions." They are concrete Jobs with verbs, State A, State B, and success criteria.

An Emotional Job is the only Job type with no higher-level Job above it. It is the terminal top of the upward Job Graph. Above "I want to stop feeling anxious" or "I want to feel calm" there is no further Job to ask "in order to do what?" about. Above it is the underlying need or affective regulation, not another Job.

Every fully specified non-Emotional Job points upward to terminal Emotional Jobs. Job Structure §4 stores the negative emotions in State A. Job Structure §10 stores the positive emotions expected in State B. Those emotions imply two emotion-regulation Jobs above the ordinary Job: an avoidance Emotional Job ("stop feeling anxious / afraid / ashamed / overloaded") and an approach Emotional Job ("feel calm / safe / proud / in control"). They sit above the ordinary Job as terminal motivation nodes.

The Functional, Social, and Emotional triad maps into the Job Graph, not into adjectives. A Functional Job is an ordinary outcome Job whose primary criteria are not themselves the emotion shift or belonging move. A Social Job is a Job whose higher-level motivation runs through relatedness, belonging, or attachment. An Emotional Job is the explicit emotion-regulation Job. The same customer action can serve all three. TurboTax performs "file my federal and state return correctly" while serving "stop feeling anxious about IRS mistakes" and, for some customers, "feel competent handling adult money tasks."

Operational consequences:

• Do not bury Emotional Jobs inside copy adjectives. If the customer performs "stop feeling anxious about whether this is right," the product either performs that Job or it does not. Name it, design for it, and test it.
• Emotional Jobs are often the highest-converting communication layer. "Sleep well knowing your data is protected" sells the terminal Emotional Job above the functional Core Job "encrypt customer data."
• Eliminating a negative emotion is value creation. The Remove negative emotions mechanic (Value-Creation Mechanics) performs the avoidance Emotional Job by deleting the State-A emotional cost.

How customers use this taxonomy when performing a Job

The type axis routes straight to the dominant move. Read the type, reach for the move:

Types and properties are diagnostic inputs. The dynamic process that turns them into outcomes — Consideration Set updates, drop-off analysis, the seven triggers that re-launch the Job, the compete-through-Big-Job strategy when your Solution is unfamiliar — lives in Critical Chain of Jobs (§§4–6, §12) and Behaviour Change §8.

Cross-references

• Job Structure — the eight elements of a single Job; State-A negative emotions and State-B positive emotions as the source of Emotional Jobs.
• Critical Chain of Jobs — the operational core: Critical Chains of Jobs as the structural unit for chain-participating Jobs; chain-execution dynamics (§§4–6, §12) that use types and properties as input (Consideration Set, compete-through-Big-Job, drop-off analysis, the seven triggers that re-launch the chain); Tax Jobs as the chain-break consequence (§5); cycles in the chain (§7.2).
• Scientific Foundations — introspection limits (§10) and trauma-shaped behavior (§19), grounding the conscious / unconscious property.
• Value Creation — the predict-and-compare mechanism (§4), positive and negative prediction errors (§5–§7), the Aha Moment (§12), the foundational mechanic catalog (§18) — especially Kill a Job (§14.2) and Move up a level (§14.1) for sequential-chain Jobs.
• Behaviour Change — the neurobiology of prediction errors (§7) that anchors the Tax Job framing; habit dynamics for frequency (§9, §11).
• AJTBD key theses — Job as the root cause of every product decision (§2); segmentation by Job Graph (§12); Big Job vs Core Job (§9).
• Subtraction — Kill a Job and Move-up-a-level as the dominant mechanics for any Job in a Critical Chain of Jobs.
• AJTBD interview guide — the past-payment recruitment discipline that filters Fake Jobs and low motivation in one pass.