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.)
