An easy question to ask, not always easy to answer (or even remember to ask!) but a great time-saver if you ask it often enough. 

You know this meeting; there are over 4 people present, you’re not 100% sure why you’ve been invited, but you hope it will become evident during the course of the discussion. A couple of people do most of the talking, usually with lots of historical context and probably a lot of tangents. Ideas are thrown around (some of them are even good) but there’s no clear idea of what (if anything) is going to come out of this chat. 

“What’s the next action here?” is a game-changer for meetings like this. The simplicity of the question usually helps force people to construct a simple enough answer, and just like that, there’s progress. And if it’s still not clear, you can ask it again, and ask it again, until you get to the root of what to do next. It might surprise people a bit, especially if they are the type who like to focus on the ‘big picture’, but the devil’s in the detail as they say, and getting to the big picture doesn’t happen by magic, but by lots of smaller next actions. 

As usual, this isn’t an idea I’ve just come up with myself, but it’s another gem I picked up from Michael Hyatt’s Getting Things Done methodology. 

Not only does it work for discussion-heavy meetings, but you can ask it of yourself each time you add something to your to-do list. Often I find myself trying to be efficient by writing a to-do item in its briefest possible format; “Order birthday present for mum”. However, in my brevity I usually don’t capture what the actual next action is, meaning that when I come to the task, I have to spend time figuring that out. The action here should have been; “Set some time aside to come up with present ideas for mum” – quite a different task.

So, what’s the next action? Ask it loud and ask it proud and see if it helps drive things forward.