Use the ‘Action Method’ When You Need Extra Motivation to Meet Your Goals

When you’re jumping into a complex project, it can be hard to know where to begin—but not if you’re using the “action method,” a productivity technique that requires you to view everything you do as a project. A “project” could be cleaning your house, presenting in a meeting, or answering all of your lingering emails. Basically, it’s any larger task that can be broken down into smaller ones, whether personal or professional. The aim of this change in your mindset is to provide a structure for every task you need to complete, so you spend less time battling disorganization.

When you have a bunch of little tasks to do, it’s easy to lose sight of the larger goals you have. Creating projects aimed at inching closer to those goals will not only help you get more done, but help you stay focused. Here’s why it makes sense to reframe your thinking around projects, and how to make the action method work for you.

What is the action method?

As noted, the action method seeks to help you increase your productivity and work more effectively by organizing your daily tasks, as well as your longer-term goals, into projects, then breaking those projects down into actionable steps. The basic framework comes from Scott Belsky, who laid out the method in his 2010 book Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality.

The action method was born when Belsky, a co-founder of Behance, sought to help creative professionals tackle inefficiency, disorganization, and the overall chaos of careers being controlled by bureaucracy. The intent behind it is to not only organize your ideas, but to develop a plan of action to execute on them.

The name “action method” hints at that, but it’s a little more involved than other action-based productivity techniques like “eat the frog” or the two-minute rule. With those methods, your overarching directive is to dive in on major tasks right away, and with relatively little thought. They are, in essence, about action—but the action method itself involves more planning, as counterintuitive as that might seem.

How does the action method work?

The “action” part of the action method comes after you organize your projects into three categories: Action steps, references, and back-burners. A good way to do this is to make a spreadsheet with three columns, one for each category, and a different spreadsheet tab for each project.

• Action steps are the specific tasks you need to get done, and ones that have actions behind them—like the steps it takes to prepare a presentation or clean the living room. If your overall goal is to clean the house before your mother-in-law arrives in five days, your action steps might include buying materials you’re low on or structuring a schedule for how and when you’ll tackle different rooms.

• References covers any extra information you need to accomplish those tasks, like articles that provide background research, emails detailing what needs to be done, or tutorials you plan to take; paste in or drops links to these materials here. With the cleaning example, this might include a checklist or a shopping list.

• Back-burners are more nebulous goals that don’t need to be accomplished right now and can be lofty, but should use the action items as a foundation. For instance, if the goal of the presentation in your action column is to secure a new client, a back-burner can be to secure 10 new clients by year’s end. Cleaning the whole house and keeping it clean can be a back-burner, too. By designating back-burners upfront, you keep the momentum going. You’re not just cleaning before your MIL gets there, in this case, but laying the foundation to maintain an all-around cleaner home long after she departs and using her arrival as the actionable jumping-off point. Eventually, longer-term, more sustained cleaning projects will replace the more immediate ones in your “action” and “references” tabs.

You can take the method offline if you’re a person who works better using a physical daily planner, but your spreadsheet will suffice as long as you check it every day and use it as motivation to get started and keep up with your action items. You can always add more tabs as you get things done, plus add new references and back-burners related to the goals on each existing tab, but the key is to monitor your actionable tasks and, after clearly outlining how they tie into broader goals, get moving on them right away. If you need additional motivation, the spreadsheet provides an easy summary of how they relate to your bigger-picture plans.

In this way, the method shows you the exact steps you need to take immediately to cross an item off of your list, but also illustrates how those efforts ladder up to your larger goals—but there are some potential pitfalls to keep in mind. For example, it doesn’t help you prioritize between projects. For that, fold in a prioritization technique like the ABC Method or Forster’s Commitment Inventory, which can help you determine which projects and steps to tackle first. Also, knowing what needs to be done is only half the battle, so familiarize yourself with concepts like the Yerkes-Dodson law, which dictates when you will feel most productive in relation to your deadlines, so you can slot in your action steps when they make the most sense.