Task Management (Free to Obey)

by Douglas Mercer

THE CENTRAL TENET of the task manager is to create independent entities at the level of the department and the worker. In the ecosystem of task management the task manager will function as the creator of the team and the trainer of the team (or teams) across the spectrum of competencies and functions; the function of the worker will simply be to produce. In the task management system anything and everything that hinders training and production will be deemed an evil and the job of the task manager will be to extirpate them with extreme prejudice. The team must become an unrelenting factory of whatever it is called on to produce, and distractions of all kinds must be totally eliminated. Time is not only money and it is not only of the essence. It is the essence itself and the task manager protects and husbands it with a ferocity that is feral.

The task manager will create these independent entities called teams, and then leave them to complete their tasks without interference save for intermittent and unscheduled training on the core competencies. The task manager tasks the entities with tasks: A, B, C. The task manager does not ask any questions about means. The task manager does not want to know how or why a thing was done but if it was done. The task manager gives no praise and neither expects nor accepts excuses. The motto of the task manger is “nothing succeeds like success and only success succeeds.” That is, in the ideal world of the system the task manger simply wants to know if a thing was done. This is known in the secondary literature as the task management binary: yes or no, success or failure.

What is the role of the task manager? The role of the task manager is to be the mother hen of her creations, which she considers progeny. To protect the entity from the extraneous and the superfluous is the role of the task manger. Within the department itself is a department manager who functions in the entity like a second task manager (a clone of the first). While the role of the first task manager is to cocoon the entity from baleful outside influence (rent seeking, political pressure) the role of the second (which will be no concern of the first) will be to protect the entity from the inside from the always-multiplying excrescences which inevitably infest any organization, first and foremost the meeting. A great and copious secondary literature has risen up around the concept of the meeting. Glorified pep talk, executive summary, teaching by repetition, temperature-taking, childlike hand-holding session, overview of means: The theory of task management rejects all of these out of hand.

The theory of task management is nothing if not radical, and hence views the meeting (that most egregious invention of the modern world of work) as the enemy of life and production. What is a meeting? A laconic and lapidary wag once said a meeting is a group of people who are not working. A meeting is the polar opposite of the basic functions of the task management system: training and work. In this system, one is either learning or working, and, if one is doing neither one nor the other, one is wasting that most sacred of things: time. Just as Xs on a spreadsheet are pernicious and evil, toxic barnacles that attach themselves to the hull of a healthy ship, so meetings function as a parasite and leech or a tapeworm of time, and suck the blood dry from the entity. No task manager ever scheduled or countenanced a meeting. No coffee, bagels, or rolls have ever been served in her presence.

When the bureaucracies of the late 19th century were transformed into the leviathans of the 20th, serious thinkers all across Europe were bewildered by their properties and propensities, which appeared to them byzantine and myriad. It took the genius of a Weber to cut them down to intellectual size by saying that bureaucracies were living and breathing organisms that by their nature took on a life of their own, always seeking to grow by some inner propulsion, and soon they slipped the grasp of their creators and monsters were born. Hence, as the avatar of life and work and production, it is the essential task of the task management system to be the sworn and mortal enemy of all bureaucracies. For in the end there is A) bureaucracy, rule bound systems, systems of oversight and monitoring, systems of control and systems which function as the moral equivalent of institutional colonoscopies where the absurd creeps in and soon the auditors are auditing the auditors ad infinitum; and B) there is the life of the task management system of action, where no evil and time-consuming spreadsheets loom (and no green-eyeshade civil-servant parasites) by checking if the work was done. The work will always be done in the task management system — of that you can be sure; one only opens one’s living eyes to see it.

As the representative of life, the task manager will seek to ensconce the entities she has created (called teams) in a space immune from any and all enervating, sapping, malign, and destructive phenomena. As the representative of life, the task manager will ensure that no boardroom scruple, or arbitrary rule on a piece of paper, or ad hoc bylaw, will stop the living and breathing team from creating what it was created to create — more productivity, more work, more success, more energy: more life. The task manger does not throttle or bottle energy by constantly taking the temperature of the patient (the teams) or checking for vital signs. She has seeded the teams as a life force of creation, and sees by their constant motion in pursuit of their tasks and goals that they are hale, healthy, and whole. So no secondary shadow (pale imitation of life) of oversight haunts the world of work in the system of task management: only goals, tasks, work, life.

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Interlude on Rent-Seeking

Rent-seeking is when non-productive groups or individuals leech off the productive by creating systems of control which parasitize both life and work. Rent-seekers abound in the modern system of management and are the ugly and evil stepmothers of work. Generally appointed by useless boards (who are themselves rent-seekers), they sit in corner offices or top floors protected by sinecures and alphabet titles and do nothing all day except steal from the body of the community of the people. Rent-seekers manipulate the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than create new wealth; rent seekers suck the blood from the worker and, as such, are the enemy of life and the people. No task management system will ever abide a rent-seeker.

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Stripped down, Spartan, and bare, the system of task management knows nothing of the superfluous; goal-oriented and relentless in pursuit of the task, always moving toward the goal, the team functions as a powerhouse of explosive energy unleashed from the pernicious influence of supervision and administration; the task manager does not niggle in the interstices of paper, nor is she penny wise but pound foolish: Everything in this system is geared towards life and the performance of life; in her relentless role as the queen bee of the team, the task manager will constantly seek to know not what the team is doing, or how it is doing it, but that it is equipped for the task; pollinating the team with her wisdom and knowledge, she will go from flower to flower (that is, worker to worker) to ensure that the worker is capable and functioning; The task manager will clone the worker in the image of herself like the Christians say God does man; but the task manager will not say “let there be light,” but something much more profound: Let there be work — that is, let there be life.

As the guardian of work and the team, the task manager will protect the team from all duplicative and unnecessary activities. She asks herself: Does it matter? Generally it doesn’t, and she consigns the redundant and the nonessential to oblivion. The task manger’s communication style will be parsimonious of words. The task manger will never use three words where two will do. And the task manager will never speak in a vague or roundabout way that ends in diffusion and unclarity. She will speak telegraphically, and her yes will be a yes and her no will be a no; she will not offer explanations for an order when an order has been given; an order is a sacred thing that stands imperious by itself. The task manager will not seek “buy in” from the worker but, after impassively seeking the worker’s input, will issue the order which will henceforth brook no opposition. This use of language, which ideally will approach the telepathic, mirrors the primary binary of the task management system: essential/inessential. The latter is jettisoned even as the former is valorized. As for forms of address, all greetings and salutations are banned under the task management system. To say “hello” or “thank you” or to use florid words or any form of ornate puffery is anathema to we old fighters of work and is an insult to the body of the folk. We know and greet each other and salute each other and love each other only in the flesh, not in empty and barren elocutions.

It is safe to say the task management system has had a difficult time coming into its own in today’s world of work where time-servers, stooges, lackeys, sycophants, toadies, bitter-enders, backbiters, back-scratchers, and blowhards are the norm. The task management system is not for the weak of heart or the faint of breath. Imperious, magisterial, forbidding, with ruthlessness it roots out the canards and inefficiencies of the old system and streamlines all into a machine of progress. The old manager was a hoarder of control, believing that monitoring progress was progress itself and that a thermometer was a living thing rather than a mere gauge of life. In creating teams and in team-building the task manager replicates her emotionally regulated presence by cloning herself and makes the team not a reflection of herself but the bodily presence of herself propagated through time. With language comprehensive, clear, concise, and hard as steel, she seeds the future with her presence and creates herself as an immortal machine with an infinite bandwidth and appetite for toil, effort, and work. She does not handcuff energy with marks on a page or terms on a ledger or rules in a book, but liberates the always incendiary potential of the teams by setting them free from all strictures.

The task manager is the life force herself; and, as such, is the future of work. For life is a test, but it is not a test that is true/false or multiple choice — and it is most certainly not an essay test. It is a performance test. When an airplane part is created, it is immediately subjected to phenomenal pressure of such intensity and force that it exceeds by a factor of a thousand any it will meet in reality. These stress tests perform the salutary function of ascertaining the only thing that matters about the object: if it can pass the test of time, which is the test of performance. Because should that plane go down and the bodies be liquefied in the blast of the impact, no one wants to be the guy in the corner office who wrote the specs when the investigators come carrying the warrants. Safe to say that the task manager of the future we envision will never be ensnared in such a case, but, having exhorted the life force itself in the world of her team, she will glide gracefully and effortlessly through the building in a shawl as she watches the force she embodies fly smoothly through the air to its known destination of always flying, always sailing, always advancing, always learning, always working, always succeeding — and, what is more and is the most essential thing of all: always living.

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