How Task Management Transformed Man


Once upon a time, man roamed the earth with one thing in mind – to live and survive. It was man’s primal urge to hunt for food and protect himself from predators big and small. Not only that, he was also at the mercy of nature’s fury and the capriciousness of fellow men. Brute strength can’t solve problems efficiently and so it took quite a while for man to develop his intellect. With his brain bigger from the rest of the living world, man slowly but surely solved the riddles of daily survival like a modern office worker working to meet deadlines.

It was thousands of years ago before we rely on our smartphones and computers to do all the task management for us. Hunters and gatherers may focus only on catching a big game animal for dinner but they are multitasking to a certain degree like preparing their bow and arrow while setting up for the animal trap. Man has always been a creative animal thanks to its bigger brain capacity. Elements of multitasking are not new but doing it as efficiently as possible is a whole new ballgame. Man has to hunt, prepare, and cook food for a longer time than his modern counterpart, who only has to get a ready-made meal.

As communities were born, man begot offspring and his progeny begot even more. Eventually, man transitioned from a hunter-gatherer concerned about his safety and very survival to a sedentary town-dweller concerned about the welfare of his own community. His defined task of looking for food has become more complicated as he has to deal with more things in mind – politics, bureaucracy, warfare, public safety, and a mass religion.


Man has survived from all the upheavals and turbulences that happened throughout history with his ability to manage and solve different problems at the same time. If a task scheduler was invented during the construction of the Pyramids of Giza, will it halve the time it took to build that man-made wonder? Perhaps, we may never know.

Fast forward to several millennia, man has mastered every work imaginable to transform towns into cities, communities into nations, and merchant guilds into industrial factories. All throughout the world, factories sprouted like mushrooms as man perfected the assembly-line method, mechanized the whole process of building things, and financing companies from across the world. With this great progress in human history comes the dilemma of maintaining the balance of the system that governs every aspect of life. Man is now constantly inundated with work than ever before.

As they say, necessity is the mother of all inventions. Man has invented so many things for the betterment of himself and others but it also brought a lot of responsibilities that man has to handle. The Internet has connected man to everyone else from every corner of the world in an instant. With the emergence of online communities, anyone can work with other people without seeing them face to face. We can do more things than ever before thanks to online collaboration.

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