Are Your Action Steps Too Complex? Or Too Simple?

  • Posted by glen on July 17th, 2007

Are Your Action Steps Too Complex? Or Too Simple?

It’s vital to any project that it be broken down into action steps along the way. However, you can get a little too trigger happy when breaking these down.  Some people like to put every little minute detail into an action step.

  1. Take out index cards
  2. Open pen cap
  3. Write next action

While others prefer the vague approach, perilously getting close to summing up a project with a single “action step”.

  1. Make scrapbook
  2. Show family

What other steps go into making the scrapbook? I personally wouldn’t know, as I’m not much of a scrapbooker, but others will tell you that you have to buy a myriad of things from the craft store, carefully plan your layouts, get your pictures in order, and assemble the book. Phew!  This approach may benefit from a little more detail in their lists.

Steve Pavlina has a wonderful post analyzing these two approaches, and then showing a happy medium between the two.  This is straight outta the GTD methodology, known as Next Actions.   Next actions are simple the  “next action” needed to complete a project.

As to how vague or descriptive your action steps should be, it all depends on one thing: You. If you’re comfortable with really vague lists, use ‘em.  If that anal retentive side of you really needs that much detail, then break that project down into tiny slivers of actions.  The important thing is making GTD (or microtasking) work best for you.

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    • Evan
      Glen, I over-analyze things so I may end up saying things that are obvious when explaining something. The good thing about this is, though, is that it might be good for anyone else who might be looking at your instructions and they can just skip the stuff they don't need or already know - this is one instance where too much isn't much of a big deal, to me at least.
    • glen
      That's true. If you're giving instructions, you can almost never have too much detail.
    • I agree that instructions, as opposed to project plans, may need to be extremely detailed but "descend to the ground floor and extract mail from the appropriate box for the company" is going just a bit TOO far, don't you think. Bless her, she was like that with everything and drove me mad!! My instruction for "doing the mail in the morning" would be "open, note contents in book, distribute as appropriate"
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