David Allen popularized[^1] the term "Next Action", which he generalizes into a mindset he calls "_Next Action Thinking_". Next Action Thinking is when you internalize the habit and view tasks or [[Defining Project|project]]s through the lens of: > What is the next physical action I can take towards the outcome needed? This puts us more in the driver's seat of our productivity. It makes what would otherwise be big, daunting chunks of scope seem more approachable. After all, [[Action Relieves Anxiety]], and it's much easier to "Google well-reviewed tire shops" than it is to "Get new tires." A hidden benefit of capturing tasks as _next actions_ is that it front-loads the cognitive effort necessary to actually accomplish the thing. When you have a spare moment and you're looking at your task list, you're not assessing one-by-one each task considering "what does this actually entail me doing right now?", instead you're able to more quickly realize whether or not you're in the right state to take the action necessary to move yourself forward. After all, when you're bored on your computer it's pretty easy to realize that "Get new tires" is _actually_ a computer task. Some folks choose [[Next Actions List Organized by Context]]. That's not how I have done it. There's a wide reported variety in the "typical" number of concurrent "next actions" that you should have queued up (because there's a wide variety of the number of concurrent projects), I saw anywhere between 10 and 60. In my case, "Next Actions" have gone from a theoretical nicety to something I've found actually very useful after I developed my 2nd [[Obsidian]] plugin - [[Auto-properties Plugin]]. I use Obsidian's tasks and have any task marked as "in progress" automatically pulled up to a [[Frontmatter]] property called "next". This has changed my mental framing of "next action" from being "I'm not working on this, but if I were this is the next thing I'd do" to something more like "this is in progress, and next up is *this*". Somehow this mental switch has shown me the light. **** # More ## Source - [[Getting Things Done The Art of Stress-Free Productivity]] - Some Thomas Frank video from a while back ## Related [[Next Actions List Organized by Context]] [^1]: I _believe_ this to be true, but maybe it's not. Who knows.