Good goals are already actionable.1 They’re specific enough to focus on things that you can accomplish, even if those things themselves contribute to something bigger.
For instance, you can’t do “being in shape.” But you can “Bike for 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week.” And over time, that practice can lead to “being in shape.”
But when it comes to accomplishing even an actionable goal, you can almost never directly do a goal itself. This might seem odd, but it derives from how goals naturally have larger scopes and are, therefore, “projects” rather than one-off actions.
Goals and Actions
Not all projects are goals. But all goals are, by definition, projects. That is, achieving a goal is a result that requires more than one action to complete.2
You might think that something you’ve identified as a major goal for the year is small enough to complete in a single action. But if that’s so, it’s really only a one-off task. Strike it from your goals list. Or go back and think more about how you might increase the challenge that your developing goal involves.
Goals worthy of the name are projects. So, you can’t ever directly accomplish a goal by taking the action it describes. You can’t do a goal itself because a goal is a project. And “you can’t do a project … [y]ou can only do an action related to it.”3
The project, or goal, itself is too large and complex for you to accomplish it in one fell swoop. That’s true even if the goal itself is actionable, meaning that it has a well-defined objective.
This observation, though, isn’t simply a semantic quibble. It serves an important function in helping you make your challenging goals doable, even when they’re “big,” “hairy,” and “audacious.”4
Why Next Actions Are Important
The only thing you can ever do is a “next action.”5 And next actions can only ever move a project toward completion. Or if you’re taking the very last action in a series, that one action will be the step that actually brings your goal to completion. But if you took that action by itself, without all the actions that lead up to it, your project would remain incomplete.
Because next actions can only ever partially complete a goal, it’s most helpful if they are
- always small enough to be something you can easily do and
- significant enough to move you noticeably toward completing your larger goal.6
For instance, accomplishing a goal to successfully complete a textual criticism seminar becomes a series of next actions like
- Obtain the syllabus.
- Read the syllabus.
- Obtain the required resources.
- Put all reading and assignment due dates in my task manager (or onto my calendar or both).
And so your list will go on. You can’t do a whole class all at once. If you try, you’ll likely end up overwhelmed by the size of the task. And overwhelm can be paralyzing.
Instead, plan to take measurable, concrete steps toward your goal. As you take those steps, you’ll find yourself fully able to take the new, next action toward your goal. And ultimately, you’ll find you’ve finished the goal—whether that’s successfully
- completing a seminar,
- writing a dissertation, or
- rounding out any other goal you choose.
Which Next Actions Aren’t Important
Over time, you might find that your goals become larger and more complex, either individually or as a group. As they do, you’ll find it that much more helpful to clarify the very next action you need to take to accomplish a given goal.
Without that next action, your goal will just sit there, staring you in the face like an impenetrable block of intimidation.
If your next action is ever unclear, your next action automatically becomes simply identifying what the next action toward completing your goal should be.7
But notice that all you really need is the very next action to take toward a goal. You don’t need to try to plan in advance all the details of what your goal will require.
You can’t do all those actions next anyhow. And if you try to plan them all out, your planned series of next actions will probably end up off target by a good bit. In that case, you’ll have sunk valuable time into planning out actions that become irrelevant to the goal you’re really trying to achieve.
So, when you have a larger and more complex goal or set of goals, the less you need to identify all of the next actions you need to do to complete that goal(s).
Sure, if you think of a step you want to be sure you don’t forget down the road, log that step as a possible, future next action. But as you do so, realize also that there’s no use trying to plan 16 steps ahead.
All that matters right now is the very next step you need to take. As you take this step, then another, then another, your strategy for achieving your goal will naturally unfold in front of you.
Conclusion
As you consider how to accomplish your goals for this year, mainly try to identify the very next action you need to take toward each goal. Once you finished that action, you should clearly see the very next action that comes after it. And one small step at a time, you’ll arrive at your destination.
- Header image provided by Annie Spratt. ↩︎
- I’ve adapted this definition from David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, rev. ed. (affiliate disclosure; New York: Penguin, 2015), 41. ↩︎
- Allen, Getting Things Done, 21. ↩︎
- For more on this terminology, see Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, 3rd ed. (affiliate disclosure; New York: Harper Business, 1994), 91–114. ↩︎
- Image provided by Jake Hills. On the concept of “next actions,” see especially Allen, Getting Things Done, 253–65. ↩︎
- On the smallness of next actions, see especially Michael S. Hyatt, Your Best Year Ever: A Five-Step Plan for Achieving Your Most Important Goals (affiliate disclosure; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2018); Michael S. Hyatt, Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less (affiliate disclosure; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2019). ↩︎
- Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less (affiliate disclosure; New York: Crown Business, 2014), 220–21. ↩︎
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