It has the hint of a dirty word about it, like work or chore, but tasks are important for our sense of achievement. We set them in meetings and write them on to-do lists, allowing ourselves a gratifying hit of dopamine when we complete them and tick them off. They can add to our sense of wellbeing in our day-to-day lives as long as we don’t leave too many hanging around unfinished.
How do we define a task? This question becomes particularly important when we reach the position of having to delegate. Those who are delegated to can have a far extended to-do list if everyone isn’t in agreement about what a task is. For example, does reporting back on an event mean confirming it went ahead or giving a blow-by-blow description of who, what, when, where, and why it went ahead, with predicated outcomes and matters to follow up?
The dictionary definition is a piece of work to be done or undertaken, according to Google. That makes it singular. A task needs to be specific in nature or it becomes a project, a collection of tasks towards a specific goal or, as Google puts it, an individual or collaborative enterprise that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim.
The rise in popularity of apps such as Todoist and Notion, where you can set your own tasks with dates and times for completion, reminders, and notes, proves a tendency to split tasks into subtasks, making each stage of a process manageable and singular. Psychologically, this makes sense because increasing the opportunities for a rush of good chemicals during a broader task by breaking it into tick-able stages will make it more enjoyable overall and keep motivation high.
It makes sense then that behaviour-related apps for dieting and goal setting require you to input desired outcomes and to click buttons each time you get a step closer.
Having a visual prompt and a virtual pat on the back to tell you where you are at in relation to your target makes otherwise thankless jobs tangible and satisfying.
Whether you write it by hand or tap it into your phone, there is a phenomenon that might catch up with you if you don’t complete a task you have committed to. The Zeigarnik Effect describes the way people tend to remember unfinished tasks more easily than those your checked off easily. It’s the same phenomenon that means we remember cliffhangers at the end of shows more readily than we recall their resolutions. Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik discovered this in the 1920s when she noticed waiters in a restaurant had a better memory for uncompleted orders than completed ones.
The heightened sense of awareness they create leaves a lasting imprint which is what makes a task a chore: that foreboding of a job still to finish.
While it’s handy to understand the connection between finishing a task and the dopamine reward, there is a downside. Humans are programmed to chase completion, sometimes at any cost and to the detriment of bigger, harder tasks that won’t offer a quick hit. This is called completion bias and it too needs to be understood so that individuals and organisations can see where it might sneak in to their processes. By looking for the tasks which are easy to complete, rather than those that are more important or offer more growth, opportunities can be missed and big tasks grow stagnant. As writer Mark Twain put it, if you have to eat two frogs, eat the big frog first. The second won’t seem so bad once the more daunting of the two options is out of the way.
Science suggests that in delegating or taking on a task yourself, if it can be broken into subtasks it’s more likely to be enjoyed rather than endured, with the help of additional dopamine hits along the way.
And still having tasks unfinished is a valid reason not to take on anything new, for fear of disturbing motivation for the job at hand. That is, as long as completion bias can be harnessed in a balanced way and a long-held list of jobs not used as a barrier to new additions.
