What's the Real Next Action?

Wow, it’s been a while since I posted something! December 2021 must have been the busiest, most demanding month of my entire life.

It was a time when the items in my “Active Projects” list was the most.

Everything I want/need to accomplish, I treat as a Project. And last month indeed there were a lot of things that needed to be accomplished.

I realized there’s one thing that made handling multiple projects significantly more manageable.

And it’s this: the habit of asking “What’s the real next action?”

I know it sounds obvious, but you’ll be surprised at how hard this really is if you don’t intentionally put your mind into it.

For example, you might think the next action is something like “call the municipality office” … but if you think more about it, the real next action is “find the municipality office’s phone number” and even then, the real next action would be “find out the schedule when the municipality office can take calls”.

Determining the Real Next Action helps in breaking down projects into manageable tasks and frees the mind to focus on really doing the stuff that can actually be done.

Once you get this habit started, you’ll notice that you are actually getting things done instead of constantly having a feeling of being “stuck”.

The truth is, this feeling of being “stuck” often builds up and leads to making us want to procrastinate.

So the next time you add a task in your TO-DO, ask yourself: What is the Real Next Action?