Most of what's here is about getting the job: finding the roles, reading the postings, working out whether an offer is real. This one starts after you've said yes, because that's where a broad role actually gets hard.
Nothing tells you when you're finished
A narrow job comes with its own finish line. The quarter closes and the number is the number. Broad jobs don't have one. Your scope arrives from whoever needs something that week, and there's no point where the week is obviously over.
You can see it in the titles. A lot of the roles on our board are named after a person or a moment instead of a function: Chief of Staff, Founder's Office, Founding whatever. Those titles are being honest with you. They're saying your remit is whatever that person or that moment turns out to need. That's where the access comes from. It's also why the job has no edges.
The problem isn't hours. Plenty of people are happily busy. It's that after a while none of the work has your name on it. You did fourteen useful things last quarter and every one of them belonged to somebody else's function.
Write down what you own
One sentence, not a job description. Name the outcome you're accountable for.
The question that gets you there: if you disappeared for a month, what would visibly break? Not what would get slower or messier. What would break badly enough that someone would have to escalate it. That's your scope. The rest of what you do is help, and helping is fine, but it's worth knowing which of the two you're doing at any given moment.
The sentence matters because it gives you something to hold requests against. Without one, every request has an equal claim on you, and a job where every request has an equal claim is a job that fills up.
Keep a list of what you said no to
You get reviewed on what you delivered. In a job with no edges, though, the work that decided the outcome is usually the work you turned away so the important thing could ship.
None of that is visible unless you write it down. The list costs nothing to keep, and in a review it gives you something better than "I've been busy." Five things you declined in order to protect one that shipped is a record of the calls you made, which is nearer to what you're being paid for.
Say what crossed
Generalist work goes missing for a structural reason. It happens between functions, and the dashboards all point at functions. Nobody is measuring the handoff you caught on a Thursday.
So write it up yourself. Two or three lines a month: what crossed, and what would have gone wrong if it hadn't. Send it to whoever writes your review, before they write it. It's a dull habit and it works, because you're the only source of that information.
Keep the file, too. It's the same material a career story gets assembled from later, and writing a line in the month it happened beats reconstructing it two years on. Finding your through-line is what turns the file into a story.
Read the drift
There are two reasons a job stays undefined, and they call for opposite responses.
Sometimes the company honestly doesn't know yet what it needs. That version resolves. People get hired to own the things you were holding, and over a year or two your range narrows into a shape.
Sometimes you've become the place unstaffed work goes. That version doesn't resolve, it compounds, because every problem you absorb is proof that absorbing works.
Six months in you can tell them apart by direction. Is the set of things only you can do getting smaller as the company grows up around you, or bigger? That question will tell you more than any conversation about your title. Evaluating a cross-functional offer is how you look for this before you accept. This is how you check it once you're inside.
If it's the second one, and it's stayed the second one for a while, that's worth acting on. How we read a job posting is the reading you'd want for a next move. The board is where the roles that survive that read end up, and the quiz ranks them against your own pattern.