The Organize IT Habits: Everything Is A Next Action

April 21st 2008

Welcome to the third of my ongoing series of posts looking at habits you can implement that will bring about definitive improvements in your life. For the third habit I will look at the next action. It is one of the simplest but most effective pieces of advice that came out of Getting Things Done. It’s such a simple but useful concept in fact, that it transcends the narrow office based productivity framework of David Allen’s system and is an invaluable mindset in day-to-day life.

A next action is literally the next physical, visible step you need to take to move something forward. It invariably means that whatever it is you are doing is broken down into small, manageable chunks. These aren’t the stereotypical items you might put on a to-do list, it has to be clearly actionable. A to-do list tends to be a bunch of thrown together thoughts and information. For example, an old-school type of item on a to-do list might be to clear out the garage. What am I meant to actually do with that? The garage is a dump, where do I even start? If you treat it as a project instead and work out next actions for it your focus will become much clearer. For instance, my first next action for garage cleaning could be to visit the DIY store and buy shelves for my tools. Then, the next action could involve putting the shelves up. Then it could be to actually arrange those tools on the shelves.

Some people have argued that you can’t make massive strides in a project if all you are doing is working on small chunks of work. However, it’s quite the opposite. Sure, doing bits and pieces of a project without a clear plan won’t get you very far, but don’t mistake that for working on next action. The key to defining one is to make sure it has a distinct end and that you are clear as to what it takes to declare it as completed. That way you actually get things done.

Thinking in terms of next actions has three key benefits:

It makes work more manageable which leads to higher productivity. Work that previously seemed overwhelming suddenly becomes simple. It’s so much easier to get your head around a project when it is split down into smaller, distinct chunks of work. When you have a huge list of work you have to get through, where do you start? What do you actually do? Working out next actions will answer all those questions.
It’s easier to do unpleasant/unwanted work which helps to lower stress levels. Sometimes we have crappy things we have to do, it’s part of life and we can’t avoid it. However we can make it easier to get through it by working purely on the next physical action. I’m currently painting my bedroom. I didn’t want to do it, I certainly didn’t want to spend all my time on it. But I broke it down and focused on one wall per day. That’s an easy chunk of work that doesn’t take too long to do, thereby overriding all the reasons I didn’t want to do it in the first place.
It’s more satisfying to do the work, which leads to greater motivation. When you work on a massive project the big payoff only comes at the end when it is finally complete. There is a lot of work to do in the meantime, and where is the motivation to keep doing it? if you break it down into next actions, that is a small chunk of work that can be achieved in a few hours at the most, and you can tick it off when it’s done. Suddenly that huge project has lots of checkpoints/rewards along the way.

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