Getting Things Done (32 page)

Do my taxes? Oh, no! It’s not going to be that easy. It’s going to be different this year, I’m sure. I saw the forms—they look different. There are probably new rules I’m going to have to figure out. I might have to read all that damn material. Long form, short form, medium form? File together, file separate? We’ll probably want to claim deductions, but if we do we’ll have to back them up, and that means we’ll need all the receipts. Oh, my God—I don’t know if we really have all the receipts we’d need and what if we didn’t have all the receipts but we claimed the deductions anyway and we got audited? Audited? Oh, no—the IRS—JAIL!!

And so a lot of people put themselves in jail, just glancing at their 1040 tax forms. Because they’re so smart, sensitive, and creative. In my many years of coaching individuals, this pattern has been borne out more times than I can count—usually it’s the brightest and most sophisticated folks who have the most stuck piles, in their offices, homes, and heads. Most of the executives I work with have at least several big, complex, and amorphous projects stacked either on a credenza or on a mental shelf. There always seem to be hobgoblin thoughts lurking inside them—“If we don’t look at or think about the projects, maybe they’ll stay quiet!”

So what’s the solution? There’s always having a drink. Numb it out. Dumb it down. Notice what happens to many people when they get a little alcohol on the brain. It should drop their energy immediately, because it’s a depressant; often, though, the energy lifts, at least initially. Why? The alcohol
is
depressing something—it’s shutting down the negative self-talk and uncomfortable visions that are going on in these folks’ minds. Of course my energy will increase if I stop depressing myself with overwhelming pictures of not handling something successfully. But the numb-out solutions are temporary at best. The “stuff” doesn’t go away. And unfortunately, when we numb ourselves out, we can’t do it selectively—the source of inspiration and enthusiasm and personal energy also seems to get numbed.

There is another solution: intelligently dumbing down your brain by figuring out the next action. You’ll invariably feel a relieving of pressure about anything you have a commitment to change or do, when you decide on the very next physical action required to move it forward. Nothing, essentially, will change in the world. But shifting your focus to something that your mind perceives as a doable, completeable task will create a real increase in positive energy, direction, and motivation. If you truly captured all the things that have your attention during the mind-sweep, go through the list again now and decide on the single very next action to take on every one of them. Notice what happens to your energy.

You are either attracted or repelled by the things on your lists; there isn’t any neutral territory. You are either 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.

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:

In other words, things have morphed back into “stuff”-ness 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!!”

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?

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.

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.

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 sometimes 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.

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.

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.

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.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of adopting the next-action approach is that it dramatically increases your ability to make things happen, with a concomitant rise in your self-esteem and constructive outlook.

People are constantly doing things, but usually only when they have to, under fire from themselves or others. They get no sense of winning, or of being in control, or of cooperating among themselves and with their world. People are starving for those experiences.

The daily behaviors that define the things that are incomplete and the moves that are needed to complete them must change. Getting things going of your own accord, before you’re forced to by external pressure and internal stress, builds a firm foundation of self-worth that will spread into every aspect of your life. You are the captain of your own ship; the more you act from that perspective, the better things will go for you.

Asking “What’s the next action?” undermines the victim mentality. It presupposes that there is a possibility of change, and that there is something you can do to make it happen. That is the assumed affirmation in the behavior. And these kinds of “assumed affirmations” often work more fundamentally to build a positive self-image than can repeating “I am a powerful, effective person, making things happen in my life!” a thousand times.

Is there too much complaining in your culture? The next time someone moans about something, try asking, “So what’s the next action?” People will complain only about something that they assume could be better than it currently is. The action question forces the issue. If it can be changed, there’s some action that will change it. If it can’t, it must be considered part of the landscape to be incorporated in strategy and tactics. Complaining is a sign that someone isn’t willing to risk moving on a changeable situation, or won’t consider the immutable circumstance in his or her plans. This is a temporary and hollow form of self-validation.

Although my colleagues and I rarely promote our work in this way, I notice people really empowering themselves every day as we coach them in applying the next-action technique. The light in their eyes and the lightness in their step increase, and a positive spark shows up in their thinking and demeanor. We are all already powerful, but deciding on and effectively managing the physical actions required to move things forward seems to exercise that power in ways that call forward the more positive aspects of our nature.