Next Action Roulette
My ResultsManager Daily Action dashboard has gotten a bit bloated over the past year with a subset of tasks and projects that are lingering. In theory a good GTD Weekly Review would help address these, but I’ve been playing with some alternative strategies to break the log jam.
I now use the GyroQ naaa tag each time I review my daily action dashboard to see what the oldest tags are. Note that this script now calculates a grand total age of your tasks (e.g. 120 30 day old tasks = 10 years!).
I try to force myself to address one of the oldest tags in some fashion or another by either…
- Doing it
- Adding a smaller more doable “next-action” to precede it or adding a relationship from an related task that needs to come first.
- Pushing it to the someday/maybe list (if its old, that may be its rightful home)
- Pushing its start date to the future
- Delegating it
To augment the approach above, I added a new “rnd” tag which picks a random next action from the next action list. You can install it by pasting the rnd packed text from the GyroQ tag Library. A random task is also added onto the report generated by naaa.
When you have a block of free time and are struggling to pick an activity to work on, run this and either do what it says or ask yourself why you don’t want to do it and then do something to change the situation
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Next Action Analysis Updated » ActivityOwner.Com said,
January 14, 2008 @ 10:13 pm
[…] enter or not. It includes several snippets of code that were previously shared separately including Next Action Roulette, Fire the oldest 10% of your tasks, Are your Next Actions eligible for Retirement, and […]