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Anne Gennett
The power of the real next action
I was working with a client the other day, doing the second follow-up visit of the Workflow Coaching. We were halfway through the weekly review when he turned around to me and said, "It was the glasses that did it for me. I really got it because of the glasses." It was such a simple statement, but it packed such a punch. Here's the story.
This client is a brilliant man and has more on his plate than most people. But the piles of paper he had accumulated in his office were starting to wear him down. It's a very subtle thing, piles. They start slowly and build over time. They start with something you're not sure what to do with, so you put it aside. That paper is then joined by the stack of papers from the conference you went to, plus some meeting notes you need to review. Then there are the articles from your colleagues, the papers from the project that just got handed to you, and the reference material you don't know where to put. Pretty soon the pile is too big, so another one is started. And so it goes.
He had gotten to the point were he couldn't find what he needed and worse yet, he knew there were things he should be doing buried in the piles. He felt he never had enough time to really sort them out and when he did start to go through them, it was exhausting and demoralizing to find all the things he should have done and now were too late to do. He had become very reactive in his day-to day world, working on things as they were blowing up. It was taking its toll, he was anxious and stressed and just walking into his office was making him tired.
What worked for him was creating a great filing system for his reference material. As the time went by, he began to see how identifying all the projects he had taken on and then further identifying the next actions would really help him stay on top of his work. He loved being able to find what he needed when he needed it and better yet, tracking all the things he had delegated to others and being able to follow up on them, that was the icing on the cake.
But it wasn't until we were all done and doing the first follow-up visit that it really clicked. He had to get new glasses, so he listed the next action as "get new glasses." But I kept asking him if that was really the next thing to do. As we worked backwards, he realized the next action was to email someone for the name of an optometrist. He smiled as he realized this simple thing had not gotten done for so long because he kept thinking of it as get new glasses (which he couldn't do), instead of email Sue for doctors name (which he could do). So there it was, such a simple task but it put into perspective how thinking in "next actions" changes the way we get things done.
I got an email from him the other day. He's doing his weekly reviews and really feeling more relaxed and in control. And he likes his new glasses.
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