"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
Overview

Do you find yourself bored or frustrated with the work you have to do?

Does it seem like you never get to work on the kinds of things you most enjoy?
 
Do you find yourself jumping from task to task - or wishing that you could - purely to alleviate feelings of restlessness or aggravation at work?

If so, the perspective of Task Balance could be very helpful to you.

			The perspective of Task Balance gives us the tools and vocabulary we need to change our workload so that it is in better alignment with our needs...without changing the work we actually do!

It sounds a bit strange, but with the perspective of Task Balance, we learn to change our workload without changing our work!  We can do the same fifty things next week that we did last week, and yet feel less annoyed by our jobs than we did before.

In other words, the perspective of Task Balance can help us to like our work.

Task Balance is one of those things that seems so simple, we wonder why we didn't think of it ourselves!  And yet, it has implications not only to our own satisfaction level at work, but to our productivity, our stress levels, and the stress levels of those around us.

In fact, Task Balance has been correlated to the quantifiable idea of "enjoyment" presented in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by University of Chicago Professor of Psychology Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

To build your own perspective of Task Balance, read Chapters 6 and 7 of Four Secrets to Liking Your Work.

To learn even more about it, follow the other links within this section.