Task Systems

"Help is work. Get working!"

Overview

There is an almost infinite amount of tasks that people undertake. We'll be looking at the work (both paid and unpaid) that people do with some objective in mind.

The grouping we will use is based on the relationship tasks have with their objectives: which objectives they are good at, what resources they need, what kind of cognitive load they present.

With that in mind, the vast majority of human tasks can be abstracted into REPSLVS: Raising, Education, Production, Services, Logistics, Violence, Solving. We'll do an overview first then a deep dive.

Raising: Named after the most common example, it also contains the adult activities of trauma recovery and recontextualizing. It isn't about attending to the physical needs of a child - a vending machine could do that - but the way that adults interact with children to put things into context - and also create the 'boxes' of context that the child will later put their own experiences into. Also how children interact with many other people - peers, younger or older children, teachers, other adults, role models.

Education: Mixed with raising during schooling, found all across the lives and communities that humans construct. You'll find this formally in mentoring, training, on-boarding and study, but also when joining new subcultures or workplace cultures, in innovation and improvement, in observation and in play.

Production: This one's about physical objects that are used for other tasks, so it doesn't include purely artistic pieces. However, this deceptively simple category explodes in complexity when you start to think about how we produce objects using other objects that we have produced - every object you see relies on a web of thousands or hundreds of thousands of other products.

Services: This catch-all term for "the work of combining and organizing tangible and intangible things to get to particular outcomes". Making sure someone has a nice time at a restaurant, working as a safety consultant in a factory, advertisements, the like. It has a very different cognitive load profile to production (ongoing rather than front-loaded), but has a lot of similarities - especially when you start offering services to match people with the services they need - a search engine for example. Looking at you, Google.

Logistics: This one's a little different to our day-to-day experience of logistics, which is the end point. Similar to services but with very different organizing principles and some odd constraints. As a rule, if you solve a problem it's a service. If you solve the entire system at once, it's logistics. We'll look at how this can be done in different ways - explicit commands and bookkeeping for how much food you have at home, forecasting and depots for flexible inventories of goods and services in business, entire networks of independent actors in the rental housing market.

Violence: Easy to create and readily available, useful even if you're not the one actually hurting people, the forever temptation of "you can just make people do what you want, without having to convince them". However, there is a good reason that violence is such a serious decision: it has severe closing out problems that you need to know before you start. No matter how tough you are or how many resources you have, if there isn't a solid answer to the question "Ok, now what?", you're in trouble.

Solving: There's no defense against smallness of perspective, there's not even any way to detect it until you come up against something unexpected. This is true on a society-wide level just as much as it is true for a single human. To counter that, we have reporting structures.... which are very difficult to organize in a way that makes them work. Example if you're unfamiliar with this stuff - the journey from reporting 'Minamoto Disease', investigating it, and learning about heavy metal testing: link.