Understanding Task Grouping Strategies

This paper’s concern is with the exploration of one aspect of multitasking, namely the grouping of tasks. Our own studies reported in brief within this paper and related work suggests that groupings of tasks are both possible, desirable, and occur. These grouping are behaviours that support the creation of ‘sets of tasks’ by some form of commonality. This commonality may refer to the tool or transformation or to facets of context such as locations or participants. In line with the assertion that task structure is a joint reflection of how a task is represented in memory and how a task is carried out in the world this paper seeks to understand the wider ramifications of such task / subtask groupings. We outline two case studies that provide supporting evidence of task groupings. From this we extract four forms of grouping that are scoped in relations to locations, deadlines, participants and roles.