IP 10 Unit 7.1: What is Task Management?

 What is Task Management?

Now that we are starting to master some basic skills and ideas within Information Processing I want you to start thinking about you usually work on your projects.

Close your eyes. 

Try to think about the last major project you did for a teacher. 

How did you feel when your teacher told you about the job you had ahead of you? Did you get anxious? Did you wonder how you would get it done?  

If you are lucky, you may have known exactly what to do right away. If you were even luckier you knew exactly what the teacher was asking for and you knew you had the skills to get things done.

Yet for most of us, that anxious overwhelming feeling is usually what we get right away. It usually hits young people the hardest. It is something adults learn to be pretty good at even if they don't realize what they are doing. They just do it. 

Fortunately, it is a skill that we can all learn with practice. The process is pretty much the same whether we are tying our shoes or writing a major essay. 

If we do it well, we figure out what needs to be done and do it. 

If we don't do it well, we usually put off doing what needs to get done and wait until the last second to do it. While this may work for us some of the time, it isn't as good as getting ahead of a problem and dealing with it on our own terms.

In this class, we are going to do this by using 'planning briefs'.

These are a brief description of a task or project including:

• The purpose or goal
• The desired outcome
• Target audience
• Best format of the finished product.