An earlier text on help could be seen as addressing special cases of the question “Who does what? (And why?)”, centered on when who should help whom for what reason.
Below, I will go into some other angles of this topic, including who should be assigned what task in an office (or other work) setting.
While I will not discuss the topic explicitly, I encourage the reader to keep in mind how problems often arise from the attitudes of many children, women, and Leftists, e.g. in that a child (woman) tries to pawn off a task on the nearest adult (man) or that a Leftist pushes a “from everyone according to his ability (and never mind that he might want to do something for himself or simply have some spare time)” policy—often while using some euphemistic formulation that hides the true effect/intent, e.g. by speaking of “solidarity” or “paying his fair share”. (And note how a too spoilt child might keep a poor attitude into adulthood or an adult used to handouts can develop it.)
The idea of giving a task to someone who happens to have the time to spare is often sound, especially, in an office setting (provided that the choice has the right skills, knowledge, and whatever else might be needed).
However, it can also result in unfairness or backfire. It is especially important to keep in mind that a current lack of work can have different explanations, including a temporary fluctuation (that later can go the other way), a deliberate shirking of work (shirkers are better fired than given more work), and a higher productivity. For the last, it is very important to make sure that the higher productivity is rewarded and not punished.
For instance, if two workers (at fixed wages/salaries) both have the same basic assignment and the one simply is more productive than the other, he might well be done at an earlier stage of e.g. a 40h work-week. Just giving him “more of the same” to fill out the week can then give him an incentive to work slower the next week and will certainly fail to give his colleague an incentive to speed up. This the more so when the additional work is taken from the backlog of the colleague.
An important special case is the use of a common (literal or metaphorical) inbox, where several workers pick their work from the same source, and this type of “more of the same” automatically arises for the faster workers. Depending on the level of responsibility and motivation, this might work well—or it might be a disaster, where everyone tries to do the minimum. In most cases, it is likely better to divide the inbox into one-per-worker, with potential additional benefits in e.g. quality control. Barring that, the employer should find some other way to track who-does-how-much-in-what-quality in order to reward the productive in some form and/or to get improve or replace the unproductive.
For sufficiently simple and uniform tasks, some type of payment-per-unit might work well, but this soon becomes untenable as the complexity and/or variety of tasks grow, in part because the tasks are no longer fungible (and the count becomes potentially misleading and incentives are given to avoid hard/lengthy tasks in favor of easy/short ones), in part because the scope for quality compromises increases. In some cases, as with “lines of code” as a productivity metric in software development, incentives can be given to be outright wasteful and unproductive, and to create an inferior product.
A good illustration of the complications that can ensue, and some insight into how to handle things better, can be found in many school scenarios. (But note that these scenarios are, in themselves, slightly off topic, as it is not a matter of distributing work to be done but of filling up time.)
For instance:
A teacher hands out a sheet of math problems for the children to solve during the next hour. For most, as intended by the teacher, this is a lesson filling task. But then we have that one kid who is done with the entire sheet in half or less of the allotted time. (And is done because he actually has solved the problems—not because he, e.g., has scribbled a little here-and-there and then given up.)
Consider some potential approaches on how to handle this situation:
Give him another sheet with problems of the same type and difficulty:
Unless he has a particular liking for solving easy math problems, this will be demotivating busy work.
Tell him to spend the remaining time double and triple checking his answers.
In certain settings, this might be a legitimate idea, e.g. in that it can be better to perform such additional checks before handing in an important test than to leave early. For a more everyday task, however, this will be mind-numbingly boring and demotivating.
At a minimum, the teacher should make sure that the answers are not already correct before giving such an “assignment”, else it truly is just an unproductive waste of time. If a single, or some very few, answers are wrong, it might also be more productive to jointly discuss them and to try to figure out why they were wrong.
Give him a sheet with harder problems:
For the right recipient, this can work very well by being a stimulus and a reward; however, others might see it similarly as the first item.
Give him an opportunity to do more advanced work in a less structured/imposed manner, e.g. by letting him read ahead in the math book for next year:
This will likely be seen as a reward by most and has the advantage of getting future work out of the way. (Based on the added assumption that those who work that much faster usually have an interest in math or are generally interested in learning.)
Let him, within reasonable limits, do whatever he wants with the surplus time, be it more math, reading something, getting homework out of the way while still in school, whatnot:
This is likely the ideal solution. (Short of those that address the negatives of intended one-size-fits-all schooling in a more fundamental manner, e.g. by some type of “acceleration” program.)
Parts of the below might draw more on fictional depictions than on own experiences, anecdotes by others, and other real-life sources. Individually, they should be taken with a grain of salt; however, at worst, they serve well to illustrate some attitudes to avoid.
In other cases, some seem to have a presumption that they have the right to intrude upon the spare time of others, e.g. by dictating that some friend or relative is to participate in a particular pet project, say, amateur theatre or in scenarios like “What are you doing this weekend? // Nothing special. // Great! Then you can help me with [whatnot]!”—as if time not specifically planned for something in advance (and time planned for something that is not “special”) would be there for anyone to appropriate. Schools, clubs for children, and similar, often seem to feel free to impose on the parents to do (or pay for) this-and-that. A particular presumption is variations of the “honey do” list, where (almost always) the wife hands over a long list of unilaterally dictated to-dos to the husband, which then gets in the way of rest and relaxation after a hard work week, of the reading that he had planned to do, of the golf that he wanted to play, of the time that he wanted to spend with “the boys”, or similar—yes, he might be off from work, but that does not automatically mean that he has nothing better to do than wife-dictated chores.
Such issues are made the worse when the victim has little clue of what is beyond the horizon. A (from my point of view) strictly fictional example is something that I have seen, in variations, in several comic strips: a teenager enjoys the first day of the summer holidays, to which he has looked forward for weeks and for which he has often made plans of his own—and the parents drop a summer job, summer camp, or a parental variation of the “honey do” list on him with no prior notice.
It might or might not be that one of these was justified. (Job experience, e.g., even money aside, can be a very good thing at that age.) However, this presupposes that communication has been sufficiently timely—there is a world of difference between, on the one hand, imagining weeks of freedom and then being thrown into a summer job and, on the other, knowing from the beginning that the summer job was coming. Moreover, there can be a world of difference between a summer job with or without a week off between school and job.
(Here too, of course, it is the principle that matters, not how specifically a teen is or is not treated.)
Note the important difference between wanting or asking for help and simply presuming that help will be given (that the time of someone else can be appropriated, whatnot). Ditto between a straight question and an attempt to manipulate the counterpart, which could be an alternate explanation for the above “What are you doing this weekend? [...]” scenario. Be upfront about wanting help and leave it to the other party to help or not help. Better yet, offer something in return. (Exactly what will depend on the circumstances, with a too wide range of possibilities to enumerate here. At a minimum, however, outlays like cost of transportation should be covered.)
That the one who has the greatest ability to perform a particular task should perform it is also somewhat plausible—but can also backfire.
Among the complications:
The suggested choice might not have the time or might otherwise be a poor choice.
(The “otherwise” can vary greatly. For instance, in the office, he might be bored and demotivated by the task at hand, which implies that routinely giving him more of such tasks could cause him to leave. For instance, in a private setting, he might have different plans of his own. Also note portions of the above.)
If others are never given such tasks, they will never learn/improve their skills at these tasks, implying that the suggested choice is stuck as the choice for the duration.
What then happens if he is absent (e.g. because he is ill or left for a different employer)? What happens if the workload grows so large that it must be divided? What if he has had the time in the past, but future tasks will swamp him too much? Etc.
Keep in mind that it is better for a beginner to learn a new task while someone more experienced or skilled is available to e.g. check the work, give help, and to serve as a safety net, should the beginner run out of time or prove incapable of the task.
The best at one task is often the best at quite a few other tasks, implying that he can then be overloaded while others roll their thumbs, or find himself doing a lesser task that he happens to be the best at and not a more important task that he also happens to be the best at. (Reasons include that many tasks involve intelligence, that someone, all other factors equal, with more experience will tend to have developed more and deeper skills, and that the willingness to develop skills varies wildly. In many cases, physical size or strength is the deciding criterion.)
Ideas like “leverage” are important here. It might, e.g., be that using X over Y for one task brings a productivity gain worth a thousand Euro over some time period—but that using X over Y for another task doubles that gain. For positions/tasks with a sufficient difference in leverage, the increase can be far larger than a doubling. Contrast e.g. the CEO of a company with a receptionist and consider how much more can typically be gained when the choice of CEO is improved relative an equal improvement in the choice of receptionist.
This problem is particularly common outside the office. Consider children who want to dump tasks on their parents and “group work” in school, where one or two students might be stuck doing most of the work for the entire group.
Looking at myself as a software developer and in a typical team, I have not only usually been the best developer all-round but also the most knowledgable in several sub-fields—and I have often been the best typist and the best at English (working in Germany). I am best used as a software developer, but a too naive assignment of tasks might have seen me, say, translating German documentation into English.
Outside an office, such misallocation can even be systematic. For instance, some type of organiser might ask “Who is good at task A?” (or, e.g., “Who has time to do task A?”), the first to raise a hand is assigned A, and the process continues with B through Z. But whoever was assigned A might better have been assigned Z, because Z was a more important task and he was the best choice for Z too. Or consider the potential fate of tall men like me when tasks are assigned based on superficial criteria, e.g. “You look strong, so you can unload that truck.” (while I am, in a manner of speaking, smarter than I am tall).
The idea presupposes that the best choice can be determined in advance.
Sometimes this is the case; sometimes a merely “sufficiently good” is found (which might work well, but does violate the idea); sometimes someone insufficient is found.
For instance, in software development (and a great many other areas) intelligence and attitude are often more important than years of experience and degrees earned (after adjusting for how they filter for intelligence and attitude), while many certificates of this-and-that are near useless as criteria. However, years of experience (etc.) are so much easier to check than intelligence and attitude—the more so, when the decision maker has little personal contact with the candidates and/or is not himself a software developer.
A particular complication is that presumed, self-claimed, and/or claimed-by-the-naive experts often are not actually experts. Another that even a legitimate expert might not be sufficiently “current” to solve a smaller task at speed without shaking of the rust, refreshing his memory, or similar—for such smaller tasks, a non-expert who is “current” might be the better choice.
An interesting personal experience from my uni days, one that gave me some of my first thoughts on these topics, and one that illustrates several points from the overall text:
Some programming task required a complicated regular expression. I was (back then!) only superficially familiar with regular expressions and another team member had claimed to have used them on many occasions. I asked him for help before giving it a shot of my own—after all, why should I spend ten minutes performing a task that he could do in thirty seconds?
The result? He sat down at my computer, with me looking on and hoping to learn something, and proceeded to slowly assemble the right expression very much in the manner that I would have. In the end, he, too, took ten minutes, the overall “man-minutes” used were double that (as I performed no work in parallel), and I learned nothing or next to nothing new about regular expressions. On the upside, I did learn at least two lessons in other areas, namely that (a) presuming expertise (here, relative my own level) in others can lead us wrong and (b) it can be a bad idea to ask for help without first making a genuine own attempt.
(The “ten minutes” are extremely approximate and border on being a placeholder. I stress that my counterpart had, himself, claimed only experiences—not outright expertise.)
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