Cognitive control theories have long emphasized information control, the processes that detect and resolve conflict between competing response tendencies or suppress irrelevant semantic activations. Yet by focusing almost exclusively on response‐level interference, these models have largely ignored a complementary mechanism: task control, which selects, maintains, and switches between entire task sets and actively inhibits competing tasks. I will show that task control plays an important role across a variety of paradigms, including the colour-word Stroop, the Eriksen flanker task, and numerical-cognition tasks. I will make a distinction between proactive and reactive control modes, demonstrating that classic conflict-adaptation effects (Item-Specific Proportion Congruence, List-Wide Proportion Congruence, and Congruency Sequence Effects) can be driven not only by adjustments in information control but also by shifts in proactive task control. Finally, I will illustrate how information and task control dissociate in developmental populations, in a series of experiments comparing healthy younger adults with older adults.