OK, so this section - the next two pages - is kind of optional. 'What does that mean?' I hear you roar: 'Do I need to read it or not?'. Well, kind of. You do not need to read and understand every detail, or decipher precisely what each diagram means. You should, though, have a rough grasp of the kind of tools that are available if you need them.
Let me explain: if we want to work efficiently, we may need to do things like...
- do things in a different order
- achieve results in a different way
- stop doing unnecessary tasks
In order to do stuff like that, for anything that isn't trivial, you need to analyse the activity involved. To take one example - the last of the list above: if we want to stop doing unnecessary tasks, we are very unlikely to find them on our weekly to-do list. That list might contain things like 'lesson planning', 'marking', 'e-mails', etc - all things that we absolutely cannot stop doing. If, however, we look closely at how-we-plan-lessons, how-we-do-marking, and how-we-tackle-e-mails, and break each of them into smaller steps, it is very, very likely that we will find steps that we can just stop doing. So, on we go with our introduction to task analysis....