Getting Things Done - GTD
The Usefulness of Clear Next Actions
AUTHOR: Francisco Sáez
"Clarity breeds mastery. And the goals you set drive the actions you take." ~ Robin Sharma.
Gaining Control Through Engaging:
1. Gaining Control Through the Engaging Step
2. The Usefulness of Clear Next Actions
3. Factors That Define Priorities for Action
I have already talked about this topic on a few occasions, but I cannot stress enough the importance of clearly defining the next physical action needed to move any situation in life forward, for two reasons:
- Because asking ourselves what is the next action is the key factor in dealing with each of our pending issues.
- Because it’s still something that many people seem to avoid. It’s still not a common practice.
As I told you in the previous article, the Engage stage of the GTD workflow consists of choosing at each moment the best action you can carry out among all those that make up your inventory of next actions.
Therefore, in order to carry out this stage effectively, you must first clearly define all those actions that make up your Next Action List.
“A Next Action is the next specific, concrete thing you can do now to move a project forward.”
The decision of what the next action needed to move forward in a project is, and its definition, is taken in the second stage of GTD workflow: clarify. More specifically, at the moment when you are processing actionable items.
To clearly determine what the next action is you need to think about issues such as what kind of commitment you’re willing to make, where you need to be to carry out the action, how much time you’ll need to do it, and so on. Without this determination you’ll miss the opportunity to make progress on your projects when you’re in the right context and you’ll probably procrastinate some activities just because you think you don’t have enough time or their statement isn’t obvious enough.
If you haven’t bothered to decide what the next action is, your brain will keep thinking about the project as a whole, and the project will keep getting stuck.
And if you’ve decided what the next action is but haven’t been specific enough, your brain will keep asking itself questions about what to do when you have that action in front of you, and you’ll tend to procrastinate.
To make it easy to choose the next action to be taken, and to make the Engage stage run smoothly, it’s necessary that when you are clarifying an actionable item you complete the whole mental process. To find out if you have sufficiently defined a next action ask yourself these three questions:
- What needs to happen first?
- How should it happen?
- Where does it happen?
Identifying the next action goes hand in hand with defining the desired outcome. Both questions bring a lot of value to resolve any situation and are fundamental to engage positively with the commitments that are made. Actions are determined by the results we desire, and results are achieved through actions.
The value of having defined a clear next actions list is that you can rely on your personal management system to guide you when you have the energy to do things, but not to think and decide.
Create a manageable Next Actions list
If you do a good workflow management, many of the captured items won’t end up as actions that you have to perform yourself.
Once you are clarifying what the issues that have recently appeared in your life consist of, in addition to clearly defining what the next action needed to move forward is, you have at your disposal tools that will allow you to significantly reduce the volume of unfinished business. Specifically, you should:
- Immediately execute those actions that you can do in less than two minutes, and
- Delegate those actions that can or should be done by others, if possible.
The Two-Minute Rule is based on the fact that things that can be done in that time would normally require more management time if we were to organize them in our system, so it’s more efficient to do them on the spot.
Anything that can be done by someone else, provided there is an agreement to that effect, should be delegated. In this context, delegating does not necessarily imply a chain of command. You could delegate a task to a colleague, your partner, your sister, or even your boss, if he or she is the most appropriate person to do it.
Again, you need to have identified and defined very clearly what the next action consists of in order to apply the two-minute rule or to delegate it. You can’t apply the two-minute rule if you don’t know that the action can be done in that time. And you can’t delegate an action effectively if you haven’t given it enough thought.
Putting these two rules together, anything that can be delegated following the two-minute guideline should be delegated at the same time (sending an email or a message is probably the most effective way in many occasions). More complex actions will have to be delegated face-to-face or through an actual conversation, so they should be included in the corresponding agenda for later follow-up.
Once you have completed the clarification procedure by applying these two rules, what remains on your List of Next Actions are the actions of more than two minutes that you must carry out yourself: your real inventory of next actions.
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