One day I was in a large ballroom at a hotel in San Antonio, Texas. I was preparing for a workshop I would be delivering in about 2 hours from that moment. I had a task to complete: I had prepared 220 copies of a 16-page handout – one per attendee – and I needed to place them on the table in front of each seat. While I was walking around placing the stapled handouts on the tables, a corporate executive who had hired me was following me around, engaging me in idle chitchat. I listened and conversed as I would in most other social conversations.
Let’s turn our attention to another task I was involved in at a different time in a different place. It was a Monday morning and I was working on some financials, finalizing a balance sheet. Someone came into the office I was in, saw me with my laptop open and a calculator in my hand, and began talking with me about a college football game we had both watched the previous Saturday. I told him I couldn’t talk right now because I couldn’t break my concentration.
One more scenario: Just last week I was standing in a conference room with a white board and dry erase markers. I was deep in thought. I was mapping out a strategy for a marketing campaign I was formulating. Had you been observing me from a distance, you would have seen various things. At one moment you might have noticed me staring at the board, motionless. . . At another moment you might have seen me staring at the board and my lips were moving as if I was speaking, but no sound was coming out. At yet another moment you might have seen me sitting back in an office chair, staring up at the ceiling, and then abruptly getting up, erasing something off the white board, and writing something new with a different colored dry erase marker. Had you started to converse with me, I would have likely ignored whatever it was you were saying and jumped in, taking control of the conversation and moving it in an entirely different, and random, direction, pontificating on whatever I was working on.
These three scenarios are about work – different types of work.
The first scenario involved process work. I had a simple task at hand: place a handout on top of the table in front of each of the 220 chairs the attendees would be sitting on. It was time-sensitive in that it had to get done quickly and completely so I could move on to a different task. It didn’t take a lot of thought or concentration. It was non-complex in nature. I could carry out the task and simultaneously carry on a conversation with someone.
The second scenario involved serious analytical calculating. I didn’t have to think creatively, but I did have to concentrate to get the numbers right. One small error would lead to an incorrect outcome and I would have to start all over to figure out where the error was. There was no way I could justify having a conversation. The task needed my absolute, total concentration.
The third scenario was far less predictable and far less exacting than the mathematical mindset I had to use in the second scenario. I was deep in thought but I was working on a creative problem that required the magic of imagination. I had to think outside of the box, outside of the normal parameters and strictures that dominate much of our thinking. Talking with someone was fine, provided the talk was about the marketing matter at hand.
These three scenarios describe three types of work. (There are more than three types of work. For example, there are occasions where I need to use a scanner to scan the barcode on the ID badge of certain types of employees to confirm they attended a certain type of training seminar. That work is what I would call transactional. The employees form a line, walk past me, I scan their badge, there is little to no interaction. It’s a transaction, nothing more. But for purposes of this column, I will limit my examples to the three types mentioned above.) Let’s call them Type A, Type B, and Type C.
Type A work is simple process work. For my college students, that might be the completing of an open-book exam I give them. They read the question, then they search for the answer in the textbook, then, once they locate the answer, they turn back to the exam and indicate the correct answer before moving on to the next question and repeating the process. Type A work might mean a Contractor with expertise in painting houses engaging in preparation to paint a room by throwing tarps over the furniture, placing a strip of masking tape along the window sills, preparing his cans of paint, having his rollers, brushes, ladders, thinner, and rags ready, and then going to work. A librarian might engage in Type A work when she is in the process of reshelving books that had recently been returned, by carefully noting the Call Number located on the spine of each book and then returning the book to its exact proper location. A person who works on an assembly line and whose job it is to place a certain label on each product coming across the conveyor belt is doing process work.
Type B is Analytical work. It might involve doing research. It might involve reading a report to understand something. It might involve balancing your checkbook. It might involve doing the necessary computations on various trigonometry equations. Such work requires very focused attention to detail. There are exacting standards that are drawn upon and adhered to. Interruptions in this realm are anathema. Analytical work demands focused concentration.
Type C involves a very different kind of thought process. Here we enter the world of ideas, imagination, and creativity. Magical things can eventuate in this realm. The human brain has enormous capacity for imagination by drawing upon disparate bits and bytes of experience, memory, data, and novelty. Thus, a prosecuting attorney might work on both his opening statement and his closing arguments, as well as the laying out of evidence in a manner designed to point to the guilt of the defendant. That same attorney will undoubtedly think through how his counterpart – the defense attorney – may present any counterarguments that point towards the innocence of the accused, and the prosecuting attorney will spend considerable amounts of time exploring vulnerabilities in such counterarguments. An artist, say a musician, would use just such a thought process to compose a jazz song, looking at various musical components such as key, rhythm, time signature, melody, harmony, dynamics, and timbre to churn out various motifs, riffs, whether the band will employ a vamp, where improvisation might take place, which instruments will have an opportunity to solo, how the song will begin, how the song will end, etc. Enormous creativity goes into such matters. The same kind of thinking would take place with a poet composing a poem, a journalist writing a news article for the Wall Street Journal, a dancer choreographing a dance, an author writing a book, or an account manager crafting a sales strategy.
Being clear on the type of work you are engaging in at any given moment is paramount. The reasons are obvious: a certain mental model being embraced when performing any particular type of work is essential to success. But when the nature of the work itself changes, that is, when the task changes, the odds are high that the mindset must change with it. Unless a person is, for example, doing process work, and then, upon completion of that task, taking on another task that also involves process work (and thus utilizing the same mindset throughout both tasks) a person switching work tasks must take a brief moment to assess what type of work the new task involves, and he or she must then switch one’s mindset accordingly.
Get in the habit of taking into account the nature of your work tasks and be mindful of the type of thinking, the mindset, that is needed to effectively carry out the work. Over time, you will get better and better, (faster and faster), at making such assessments and your execution of your work will become effortless. It is smart to consider the various and disparate types of work because each task requires a different approach, set of skills, and mindset. By recognizing the unique demands of different types of work—whether creative, analytical, or manual—you can tailor your approach to maximize efficiency and effectiveness. Embracing the right mindset for each type of work helps you stay adaptable, avoid burnout, and improve overall performance. It also fosters problem-solving, enhances productivity, and ensures that the work is done thoughtfully and to a high standard.
That is one nuanced idea that true achievers do well with regularity.
And you can, too, if you put your mind to it.
