The notion of a work task list is a pretty big deal, if you think about it. You can call it a ‘to-do list’ or ‘priorities’ or whatever else, but the fact of the matter is: you’re rolling in at 8:57am every day (or 10:21am, naitch!) and you have a series of things you need to do. Ideally, those things — micro activities, or tasks/deliverables — would align with the bigger picture of what your company is trying to achieve, i.e. its long-run strategy. The alignment of strategy and execution is crucial to basically every business in every industry, and yet most companies are horrible at it. They have no idea what to prioritize in terms of a work task list for those who actually do the work (rank-and-files), creating a vacuum where various middle managers can create their own priorities and claim they’re “extremely urgent.” In reality, no one remotely near the top of the chain salary-wise or decision-making-wise would ever deem that thing a priority, but it doesn’t matter so long as the revenue growth is there and the bonuses are fat. Most of work is just invented digital paper-pushing as is — remember, based on technological advancement alone, we should all be working about 11 hours/week now anyway. (Economists in the 1930s predicted we’d be working less than that by now, but they forgot the mind-altering impact of worship at The Temple of Busy.)
Let’s get back to this notion of a work task list, though. How meaningless is yours?
The work task list: A personal example
I’ll lead with a story. At my last gig, I came in on most Fridays and sent out an e-mail to most of the company with digital analytics from the previous week — and at the end of a given month, it would be data from the past month. The cool thing about this e-mail is that no one told me to do it. It was a company that had no clue about digital and made money in other ways, so I thought having a weekly reminder about digital — “Hey, this thing over here still exists!” — might be helpful. I’ve done this at other jobs too. I just add it to the ol’ work task list.
Over time, I put jokes and pop culture references in this thing, and of course I got called on the carpet for that a few times. Performance improvement plan, baby! But the point is, this thing took me 60–90 minutes to write — and believe me, I can write a good, thorough e-mail in about six minutes if I’m in the zone. I spent a lot of time on these analytics e-mails.
Part of it was because I cared and wanted them to be good and informative.
Another part is that whenever I was done, I had nothing left to do that day.
See, it was one of those jams where no one really comes in on Fridays — “Working from home,” but then you can’t reach ’em till Sunday night — and if I got in at 9am and finished that e-mail at 10:30am, I was basically done for the day. I worked across the street from a Flying Saucer (beer bar) and I used to hit there for lunch for about 1.5 hours around 2pm. Then I’d come back and fire off a few meaningless e-mails and leave.
The point of this whole arc is, for 20 percent of my work week I had basically no task list to achieve. So mostly I dicked around, yes, but I also created work for myself. Now allow me to blow smoke up my own ass. The work I created was value-add. The work most people create is just more process and BS.
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