Learning Center / The Foundations

Course 1 · Lesson 2 of 5

Outcomes, tasks, projects and habits

A photographer owes a client a release form. Signing it is a task. She signs it, it is done, and nothing about the world needs to be true again afterwards. Nobody would set up a system to keep that true, and nobody should.

Now take the same photographer's show. There are prints to make, frames to order, a venue to confirm, a price list to set and one hundred people to get through a door. That is a project, and it has a finish date printed on the poster.

Between the task and the project sits the thing that actually matters: the show is open, and it plays to a paying audience on the advertised dates.

The four forms

*A task* is a piece of work with a clear end. Once it is done, it stays done. Tasks are ordinary and are not the enemy. The trouble starts when a whole responsibility is stored as a pile of tasks, because a pile of tasks has no statement of what it was all for.

*A project* is a container with a start and an end, holding tasks. A project is named after the work: "the album", "the move", "the audit". It is finished when somebody declares it finished, which is a different thing from the world being in the required state.

*A habit* is something a person does repeatedly. It lives in a person, not in a system, and it survives or dies on whether that person keeps it up. A habit is how you behave. An outcome is what is true.

*An outcome* is a state that has to hold. Nothing about it says who does the doing.

The same work, named four ways

A touring musician has four hundred records in a lock-up and a tour to fund. The same month of effort can be described four ways, and each description produces a different plan:

• "Do the mailing" is a task. It can be ticked off whether or not anything sells.
• "The vinyl campaign" is a project. It can be closed while the records are still in the lock-up.
• "Post something every day" is a habit. On a bad week it becomes the thing that failed, and the

failure feels personal.

• "Four hundred records are sold and the money is in the account by 3 March" is an outcome. It

names a state, a number, and a date, and it does not care at all how the selling happens.

The last version is the only one that can be handed to somebody else, checked by a stranger, or argued with when it is not happening. That is not a small advantage. It is the whole reason to prefer the awkward sentence.

Why the wrong label costs money

Call an outcome a project and the work stops when the meeting ends. Call an outcome a habit and the failure lands on the person rather than on the missing machinery. Call a recurring obligation a task and it gets ticked off once, in the year it was finally dealt with, then quietly reappears.

There is a quieter failure too. A person who labels everything a habit ends up believing that their own discipline is the mechanism holding the business up. It usually is not. It is usually a calendar, a folder and a reminder that nobody ever set up properly.

A test that takes ten seconds

Ask one question of the sentence in front of you: *if this were finished, what in the world would be different?*

If the answer names something in the world, it is an outcome. If the answer is "the list would be shorter", it is a task. If the answer is "that phase would be over", it is a project. If the answer is "I would have kept it up", it is a habit.