By Dennis Lowery
“What’s the Next Action?”
This simple four-word question, can transform your ability to get things done. Here’s why.
A project can sit on your to-do list for a long time without getting done.
David Allen points out that that’s because you can’t DO a project — you can only do a physical action. You can’t do a website redesign or a home makeover. You can’t even do your taxes. Each of those is a multi-step project that should not be on your to-do list, but should be on a separate projects list (meant to simply keep track of projects, not to be used for daily action). So a project is anything that takes more than one step — a much different definition than many of us use for the word “project”. This is certainly true of any writing project of any size.
Allen tells us to look at that project, and ask ourselves, “What is the very next physical action that can be taken with this project?” With the above examples, I might start a website redesign by finding five other sites with looks that will inspire my new design. The action could be to simply bookmark (and print) five sites with inspiring designs. With a room makeover, I might first stop by the paint store and get a color palette. For taxes, I could simply gather my 1099 forms, or download the new 1040 form. Specific to your writing project the next action could be a number of things depending on what stage you are at in the process.
- If you are just beginning – then before you start—look at books that are similar to what you have in mind. If you are writing a memoir then read a memoir or at least look at two or three to get a feel for the structure and flow and make notes for use in planning your book. That’s your next action.
- If you have a rough draft then your next step is to go through it, beginning to end, and look for opportunities to re-write and tighten up what you’ve written (and trust me, you will find them). That’s your next action.
- If you’ve worked through your draft and have polished it to the best of your ability then you need to have another set of eyes look at it (preferably an unbiased 3rd party professional set of “eyes”—it’s hard to get good, actionable, feedback from family and friends). That’s your next action.
- If you’ve had professional feedback on your manuscript and it’s been incorporated so that what you have is a good as you can make it. Then it’s time to find an agent, find a publisher or decide to self-publish. That’s your next action.
When we ask, “What’s the next action” we are ensuring that we have actual tasks to perform, and not vague, fuzzy terms. Many people lose or waste time by not pinpointing actionable items. They may have on their list “write a book”. Writing a book is hard work. I know. If you have that as a line item on your to-do or bucket list—you need to break it down into manageable, comprehensible and actionable chunks. A concrete task that can be defined simply like, “Write one page each day”. Do that and in a year you have a 365 page draft. The year is going to come and go anyway.
If writing a book is important to you, then take action. If you don’t have time, then hire someone to help you write it.
If you want to get things done you have to be action-oriented.
We’ve all sat through countless meetings where a topic was discussed, and we walked away without really deciding anything. Now, when I have to attend a meeting or have a conference call on one of my own projects or a client’s project, I ask everyone as we wrap up, “OK, so what’s the next action?” This forces everyone to clarify what must be done next, who must do what, and then we are accountable for doing those actions. Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of talk. The question is powerful because it forces the issue and demands action. Things actually get done.
Non-doable actions are removed from the list.
By asking what the very next action is to move a project forward, we are eliminating from our to-do lists all other actions that cannot be completed right now. If I cannot choose a color scheme until I’ve obtained a color palette, well, “choose a color scheme” shouldn’t be on my list. It clutters up the list and distracts me from what I can actually do right now. All that should be on my list is “get color palette from paint store”, because that’s all that can be done. Once I’ve crossed that off, I should add the new next action. Now my list only has tasks that can actually be done, right now, instead of bogging me down with a whole bunch of other stuff. If your list is overloaded with non-doable actions, you must continually process that list each time you look it over, and decide what can be done right now (and when you do this, you are always asking yourself “what’s the next action?”), and what can’t.
It requires and encourages quick decisions.
Many times, we put off taking action on something because there are things that have to be decided that we don’t want to think about. And the more we keep putting it off, the less we want to think about that thing. But by asking the very simple question, “What’s the next action?” we are not faced with a million decisions, but one. That makes the decision-making process very easy, and very simple. We don’t need to plan out an entire project (ugh!) … all we need to do is decide what we need to do next. And that’s a decision we can make very quickly … which means we are past the “thinking about” stage and into the action stage.
Asking, “What’s the next action?” is one simple and powerful tool you can implement right now to be more productive and to move one step closer to achieving what you want to achieve and to reach any goal or objective. Even writing the book that you want to write.
Next action: go through your to-do list and ask this question of every item on the list. It can help you move things along towards whatever goal or objective you want to achieve.
