We present the rudiments of a new theory of tasks and task views. The motivating idea is essentially as follows: in an environment in which several organizational agents cooperate to accomplish a common task, each of the agents need only know its own part of the task — this is the agent's task view. The underlying computer system may take responsibility for coordinating the actions among the different views. We discuss what task views are and why they are interesting. We also consider consistent task specification based on partial orderings of task actions and the problems involved. The major issues are the expressiveness of action conditions, tractable satisfaction of action conditions, and tractable testing for task consistency. Our notion of task consistency leads us to consider, among other things, the “expressiveness versus tractability” tradeoff encountered in knowledge representation, planning work, and a recent proposal for specification and refinement of office procedures.