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What next action?
fillanzea | Oct 27 2005
Sometimes you reach a point with a project where you can't say that there's a single "next action." Or rather, if you can isolate a discrete "next action," it's one that's going to take several months. One example: Writing a novel requires research, and so on, but there's a time when you sit down to write. What's your "next action" there? Write chapter one? But there's only an arbitrary mark dividing it from chapter two. Or another: One of my projects is advancing my level of Japanese, and as part of that, I'm working on 6 characters per day. It'll take me several months to get through that, but every time I finish for the day, my "next action" is still exactly what it was before. Is there something obvious that I'm missing? 7 Comments
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 Sometimes you reach a point...Submitted by andyc on January 13, 2006 - 1:20pm.
fillanzea wrote:
Sometimes you reach a point with a project where you can't say that there's a single "next action." Or rather, if you can isolate a discrete "next action," it's one that's going to take several months. If it's going to take several months, it's not a next action. It's still a project. I find that if I look at a NA on my list and am not prepared to do it right now, it's not an NA. So I break it up, sometimes down to 10 minute tasks. From the novel example ("outline plan for chapter 2", or "review scene x to tighten action"). These go back in the (online) system, and I cross it off on the printed copy and deal with it when it next comes around. I typically print the NA list once or twice a day, depending on how got my NA analysis was at the last weekly review. » POSTED IN:
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