we’re often told to plan by defining some goals, dividing them into more manageable projects, and breaking the projects into smaller ““bite-sized”” tasks.
these projects and tasks are pre-defined and arbitrarily scoped; they become noisy.
next actions are distinct from these component tasks – you are defining only the next physical thing you can do.
for example:
if i’m feeling hungry, my desired outcome might be to feel satiated.
my next action is not to “go eat”, but to walk to my kitchen, to check what ingredients i have, to decide on a meal, and then all of the individual steps in preparing that meal.
if i have a report due, my desired outcome might be “manager has received report”.
my next physical action is not to “send report”, but maybe to open my laptop, to find the report scope, to create a new document, to outline the first section.
these steps sound tedious to define, but in practice, we are not listing each of them out the way we might with traditional task planning. we are only deciding the very next granular step to take.
this isn’t to say that you can’t define multiple steps or tasks for a project, just that this type of planning should be used as reference from which you create next actions – they should not be considered next actions themselves.