Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.
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
POSTED IN:
 The Novel: I don't think...Submitted by stevecooper on October 28, 2005 - 5:42am.
The Novel: I don't think 'write chaper 1' is a next action; it feels more like a project to me, because it's not very specific and involves a lot of different types of work. I think you could break it down into lots of actions like 'Write the scene where Jake and Emily burn all the money, and Dexter loses the map' or 'copy-edit act 2, Scene 3 for more realistic dialogue'. Then you've got a concrete action to take. Japanese: I don't think it -is- the same action; you're actually learning a new set of characters every time, so the actions are 'learn chars 1-6', 'learn chars 7-12', etc. Same thing might apply to 'go to the gym' or 'have a shower', maybe? I dunno, but I don't think GTD handles repetitive actions very well. It's geared to projects that get completed and discarded, but you can't do that when it comes to maintenance activities you do over and over. Any of that helpful? » POSTED IN:
|
|
| EXPLORE 43Folders | THE GOOD STUFF |
