Are Your Actions "Next" Enough?

If you're not getting things done, it's not GTD.

Early on, I often found myself looking at an action on my actions list, and thinking, "nah - I'm not going to do that now." It didn't take long for the alarm bells to start ringing.

I started asking myself why I wouldn't do that action now. In most cases, I found that the action wasn't "next" enough. That means I hadn't done the "processing" job properly because I hadn't whittled the job down to the very next physical action.

So now if I find an insufficiently processed action on the list that makes me want to avoid it, I just figure out right then and there what the real next action is, and usually I do feel like doing it straight away. I move the original, not-very-next-action to my projects list, and put the actually-next-action on my actions list, do the action immediately, and cross it off my list. Feels great.