GettingThings Done. The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

positively drawn toward completing the action or reluctant to think about what it is and resistant to getting involved in it. Often it's simply the next-action decision that makes the difference between the two extremes.

Everything on your lists and in your stacks is either attractive or repulsive to you— there's no neutral ground when it comes to your stuff.

In following up with people who have taken my seminars or been coached by my colleagues or me, I've discovered that one of the subtler ways many of them fall off the wagon is in letting their action lists grow back into lists of tasks or subprojects instead of discrete next actions. They're still ahead of most people because they're actually writing things down, but they often find themselves stuck, and procrastinating, because they've allowed their action lists to harbor items like:

'Meeting with the banquet committee''Johnny's birthday''Receptionist''Slide presentation'

In other words, things have morphed back into 'stuffness instead of staying at the action level. There are no clear next actions here, and anyone keeping a list filled with items like this would send his or her brain into overload every time he/she looked at it.

Is this extra work? Is figuring out the next action on your commitments additional effort to expend that you don't need to? No, of course not. If you need to get your car tuned, for instance, you're going to have to figure out that next action at some point anyway. The problem is that most people wait to do it until the next action is 'Call the Auto Club for tow truck!!'

You can only cure retail but you can prevent wholesale.

— Brock Chisohn

So when do you think most people really make a lot of their next-action decisions about their stuff-—when it shows up, or when it blows up? And do you think there might be a difference in the quality of their lives if they handled this knowledge work on the front end instead of the back? Which do you think is the more efficient way to move through life—deciding next actions on your projects as soon as they appear on your radar screen and then efficiently grouping them into categories of actions that you get done in certain uniform contexts, or avoiding thinking about what exactly needs to be done until it has to be done, then nickel-and- diming your activities as you try to catch up and put out the fires?

Avoiding action decisions until the pressure of the last minute creates huge inefficiencies and unnecessary stress.

That may sound exaggerated, but when I ask groups of people to estimate when most of the action decisions are made in their companies, with few exceptions they say, 'When things blow up.' One global corporate client surveyed its population about sources of stress in its culture, and the number one complaint was the last-minute crisis work consistently promoted by team leaders who failed to make appropriate decisions on the front end.

The Value of a Next-Action Decision-Making Standard

I have had several sophisticated senior executives tell me that installing 'What's the next action?' as an operational standard in their organizations was transformative in terms of measurable performance output. It changed their culture permanently and significantly for the better.

Why? Because the question forces clarity, accountability, productivity, and empowerment.

Clarity

Too many discussions end with only a vague sense that people know what they have decided and are going to do. But without a clear conclusion that there is a next action, much less what it is or who's got it, more often than not a lot of 'stuff' gets left up in the air.

I am frequently asked to facilitate meetings. I've learned the hard way that no matter where we are in the conversation, twenty minutes before the agreed end-time of the discussion I must force the question: 'So what's the next action here?' In my experience, there is usually twenty minutes' worth of clarifying (and some-times tough decisions) still required to come up with an answer.

This is radical common sense—radical because it often compels discussion at deeper levels than people are comfortable with. 'Are we serious about this?' 'Do we really know what we're doing here?' 'Are we really ready to allocate precious time and resources to this?' It's very easy to avoid these more relevant levels of thinking. What prevents those issues from slipping away into amorphous 'stuff' is forcing the decision about the next action. Some further conversation, exploration, deliberation, and negotiation are often needed to put the topic to rest. The world is too unpredictable these days to permit assumptions about outcomes: we need to take responsibility for moving things to clarity.

Talk does not cook rice.

— Chinese

You have to have some experience of this to really know what I mean here. If you do, you're probably saying to yourself, 'Yes!' If you're not sure what I'm talking about, I suggest that in your next meeting with anyone, you end the conversation with the question, 'So what's the next action here?' Then notice what happens.

Accountability

The dark side of 'collaborative cultures' is the allergy they foster to holding anyone responsible for having the ball. 'Mine or yours?' is unfortunately not in the common vocabulary of many such organizations. There is a sense that that would be impolite. 'We're all in this together' is a worthy sentiment, but seldom a reality in the hard- nosed day-to-day world of work. Too many meetings end with a vague feeling among the players that something ought to happen, and the hope that it's not their personal job to make it so.

The way I see it, what's truly impolite is allowing people to walk away from discussions unclear. Real 'togetherness' of a group is reflected by the responsibility that all take for defining the real things to do and the specific people assigned to do them, so everyone is freed of the angst of still-undecided actions.

Again, if you've been there, you'll know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, test it out—take a small risk and ask 'So what's the next action on this?' at the end of each discussion point in your next staff meeting, or in your next 'family conversation' around the dinner table.

Productivity

Organizations naturally become more productive when they model and train front-end next-action decision- making. For all the reasons mentioned above, determining the required physical

allocation of resources necessary to make something happen as soon as the outcome has been clarified will produce more results sooner, and with less effort.

Learning to break through the barriers of the sophisticated creative thinking that can freeze activity—that is, the entangled psychic webs we spin—is a superior skill. 'Productivity' has been touted for decades as a desirable thing to improve in organizations. Anything that can help maximize output will do that. But in the world of knowledge work, all the computers and telecom improvements and leadership seminars on the planet will make no difference in this regard unless the individuals involved increase their operational responsiveness. And that requires thinking about something that lands in your world before you have to. One of the biggest productivity leaks I have seen in some organizations is the lack of next actions determined for 'long-term' projects. 'Long-term' does not mean 'Someday/Maybe.'

Those projects with distant goal lines are still to be done as soon as possible; 'long-term' simply means, 'more action steps until it's done,' not 'no need to decide next actions because the day of reckoning is so far away.' When every project and open loop in an organization is being monitored, it's a whole new ball game.

Productivity will improve only when individuals increase their operational responsiveness. And in knowledge work, that means clarifying actions on the front end instead of the back.

Empowerment