Concept
The next action
The next action is David Allen's unit of work: the very next physical, visible thing you would do to move a project forward, specific enough that someone else could do it from the sentence. A project, an outcome needing more than one step, cannot be started; only its next action can.
Procrastinators' lists are full of projects: write the thesis, fix the kitchen, launch the feature. None of these can be begun at ten on Tuesday, which is why they sit. Allen's discipline is to keep projects and next actions on separate lists and to give every project exactly one defined next action at all times: open chapter one and write the paragraph on the literature gap; call the plumber; draft the email to the designer. When it is done, the next one is defined. The vagueness that fear hides in disappears, and the list of frightening outcomes becomes a sequence of ten-minute moves. Brian Tracy's frog becomes usable once it is a next action rather than a project, and Fiore's thirty-minute start needs one to start on.
A real-life example
A student's list said 'thesis' for five weeks. Rewritten as a project with a next action, open the chapter one file and write the paragraph explaining why the two existing studies contradict each other, it gets forty minutes of work the same day, the first since spring.
How to use it
- 1For every item you avoid, ask: what is the very next physical thing I would do? Write that.
- 2Keep projects and next actions on separate lists.
- 3When a next action is done, define the next one before you stop.