"Task Balance" in Four Secrets "It's not enough to consider how you do things and why you do them... you must also learn to see the world in terms of what it is that you're actually doing." Chapter 6 "Task Type Conflict is not about whether you love or hate the specific thing you are doing at the moment.  It is about whether that 'thing' represents too much of a certain type of task for you." Chapter 7 "It seems inane to ask 'what am I doing?'  This should be the one question that we call can answer easily... [Yet] there is more infor-mation in front of our noses than we realize, and more hidden opp-ortunity to reduce work stress." Chapter 6 "As a rule of thumb, when you find yourself aggravated, frustrated, or restless because of a task that you have done before without these negative feelings, the central issue is probably a Task Type Conflict." Chapter 7

The Secret of Task Balance
Stories and Case Studies

For practice with the perspective of Task Balance, read the stories below and consider the questions that go with them. 

1. Trudy and Willis
Trudy and Willis work together evaluating small companies for potential investment by their employer.  Their job is to identify possible companies for funding, and do a thorough investigation of the financials, the people, the product and market, and the business plan of companies of interest. Then they present a recommendation to their management, and if an investment is made, they monitor the company's progress over two to five years.

Over the years, they have arrived at a division of labor that they both enjoy.  Trudy focuses her efforts on the existing investments, working with them on problems and on planning improvements and next steps for their growth.  Willis spends more of his time on generating the standard parts of the new prospect reports (like the financial analysis), and to a lesser extent he works on plans and strategies for finding the next investments.

Now, a new manager wants to focus on "cross-training" and have them swap responsibilities from now on.  When Trudy and Willis object, the new manager accuses them of being "averse to change."

			Why, in the language of Task Balance, might the new manager's approach be a mistake? See Four Secrets, pages 92 and 93

2. Carmen and her job
Although she was used to being a star performer, Carmen had to admit that she was struggling at work these days.  She had just accepted a transfer into the business office, and she was faced with a whole different set of challenges than those she had handled so well back in the public affairs group.  Instead of running campaigns for media attention or community awareness, Carmen now was faced with trying to improve outdated company business processes while still keeping everything running smoothly.

Balancing those two competing priorities was a huge problem.  On the one hand, she had to process standard company forms regularly, like expense forms and travel authorizations.  On the other, she was tasked with improving the ways in which those business processes worked, and with moving the whole company to an online or electronic platform.   It seemed like any work that moved her closer to one of those goals took her further away from the other one.

Her processing schedule, for example, was a disaster.  She had put together a six month plan that specified how much time she would spend processing forms, and which ones she would do during which weeks.  But she couldn't accurately predict how much work the company would generate for her in a given week, and so she was constantly ahead of or behind her forecasted schedule.  As a result, her extra time could not be use for the business process improvements because she needed it to constantly adjust her processing schedule.

To make matters worse, she was further frustrated by her inability to fix problems with the current business processes.  Her manager had told her not to bother fixing processes that would change within the year.  But something in her wanted to at least fix the easy ones.  Why let a problem fester for ten months when you can fix it in five minutes?  

			Is Carmen spending more time on some Task Types than others?  Which ones?  How is this related to her frustration? What mistakes is Carmen making with regards to the "typical elements" of each Task Type?  How is this impacting her productivity? See Four Secrets, pages 83-89