One of the ways to optimize your workflow is to recognize the types of tasks that make up your agenda to organize them most productively for you.
Classifying your tasks by type is one of the ways to make managing activities more efficient and transparent for everyone. And suppose we are going to talk about defining the types of tasks to achieve a better level of performance. In that case, it is essential that you also know how to separate the most critical activities from day to day before putting them on the to-do list.
What are tasks?
Have you ever thought about what tasks are? Without going into too long concepts, tasks are divisions of the activities that make up a project. It could be producing a creative for a campaign or buying a tent for a trip. This is because the tasks do not concern only the corporate universe.
These smaller steps have a clear objective. Ideally, they have a deadline for them to be carried out without impacting the delivery of the project.
As many of them are interdependent, each person responsible must finish the task for the other to start, without the risk of creating bottlenecks in the workflow.
Therefore, in companies, there is the figure of the project manager, responsible for, among other tasks, managing activities according to each person's ability to perform, building an execution plan by types of tasks, and monitoring the progress of deliveries.
The main types of tasks
The classification of demands by types of tasks not only helps your organization but also allows more detailed monitoring of your time management by the activities you perform within a project.
Since the advantages are strategic for tactical planning, to help you define the types of tasks, we summarize that two essential criteria serve to categorize activities by priority, which you check next, and by frequency, which is along the way. Of the text, you can jump straight to this type of task by clicking here.
Task types by priority
Prioritization is a common practice, especially in the professional context. Commonly, the creation of priorities is linked to the deadlines stipulated for the delivery or by the selection of importance, which changes the order of execution initially foreseen in the planning.
Therefore, before showing which are the most common types of tasks according to the priority parameters, it is worth remembering that any change throughout the activities must be communicated centrally so that there is no risk of rework interrupting the sequence of actions.
Emergency tasks
The name of this type of task already indicates its characteristics. They are those critical activities that have become crucial to delivering a product, campaign, or functionality and should be placed at the top of your task queue.
In summary, emergency activities are seen in crisis management, where the company needs to respond quickly to consumers or partners who need an immediate solution.
But not infrequently, they are also the result of procrastination, and with the deadline's arrival, they need to be delivered before other anticipated demands. This task is an outlier and should be avoided based on schedule monitoring.
Urgent tasks
Urgent tasks correspond to project decision makers (managers or clients) requests that need to be resolved as soon as possible.
The short term for their accomplishment is part of their character and the type of emergency task, and they are elevated to the position of the main activity in the work agenda.
But a tip is that urgent doesn't always mean important, so it's worth using management techniques, such as the Eisenhower Matrix, to scale how the task can be delegated to the team without impacting other essential demands for the sector.
Tasks on time
They are usually planned and present in the work routine, so they play an essential role in the realization of a project.