Tasks
your core work activities
Tasks is a lens for listing the core activities that make up a workflow: the actual work people do, step by step. For a newsroom, breaking work into tasks shows where time goes and which steps repeat. A team might pause here to see their work as parts rather than one undivided effort.
Questions to explore
- What are the specific tasks this workflow is made of?
- Which of these tasks do we repeat most often?
- Where does a task take far longer than it seems like it should?
- Which tasks need human judgment, and which are mostly routine?
- If we listed every task here, which would surprise an outsider?
Expert voices
“What do you love about your work, and would you ever want AI to do it for you? What do you hate, and how can you delegate that to AI?”
“Start by mapping what a journalist actually does each day: horizon-scanning, writing, posting, moderating comments, planning topics for reporters. Only then can you see where AI could realistically assist.”
“Ask which tasks you wish you were doing less often, so you would have more time for the cool and important stuff. That answer points to your best AI use case.”
Things to consider
- Breaking work into tasks shows where time actually goes.
- Routine and judgment-heavy tasks call for different kinds of help.
- A task no one questions is still worth describing out loud.
Pull Tasks when it is relevant and set it aside when it is not. Pair it with the other Perspective cards, lay them out on a table, and use the questions above to get everyone on the same page. Capture what you discuss on sticky notes or in a shared doc.
