Where tasks come from, identifying and managing them

Overview

Questions

• “Where do tasks come from?”
• “How do different task management systems handle them?”

Objectives

• “Acknowledge range of different inputs”

Where tasks come from

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We define or get assigned work from lots of different inputs - email, action points from meetings, scheduled / periodic tasks, corridor conversations, 3am thoughts. It can be a challenge to monitor all these inputs and to trust that we have defined all the work that they send our way.

Challenge

Take 5 minutes to think about the different inputs that you have and how you manage the work they define for you.

A sample ask

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Here we examine a sample email that we could imagine receiving and break down the tasks that it contains. These kinds of requests may also trigger unrelated work - we could discuss how a task management system could help process these too.

Hello Alice Bob suggested I contact you, as we need some help to analyse the organisation’s publication output for the past year. Can you automate a check for items in our publication repository and what data repositories (if any) are used to store the associated data? thanks Chris PS I have a new starter next week on project X, maybe you can help them get up to date on what you’re working on and what kind of access they need

What kind of tasks can this generate?

• Before you’ve even read the main part, this might make you remember that you promised to do something else for “Bob”, and now that is taking all your attention
• What do they actually need and by when? Finding out this information can be a task in itself.
• What might be the downstream impacts of this work - are we quantifying our colleagues outputs?
• Its probably made you question whether you have everything up to date in the publication repository
• Approach contains unrelated tasks (new starter)

Key Points

• “Digital can be infinite”
• “You have limits”
• “Managing your work is also work”