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First Action: A Smarter Alternative to GTD-Next Action for the Creatives
Resistance.
It is real. The famed Steven Pressfield wrote an entire book about it.
Procrastination is nothing more than the manifestation of resistance for the task at hand.
But I think I found a solution.
Tony Stubblenine of Coach.me wrote an extensive article about using interstitial journaling as an alternative to-do list method. Besides the concept of using journaling for productivity, what impressed me most was not to use a to-do list or more precisely defining only the next ‘first action’ for the task at hand.
He goes at length to describe the sementic difference between ‘next action’ (taken from Getting Things Done methodology) and his own term ‘first action’.
Defining First Action
David Allen, despite all the criticism, indeed gave this world a very personal productivity system that serves the new age knowledge worker. If you could have already guessed, I believe — that one of the greatest contribution to the productivity world is David’s idea of ‘Next Action’. He explains it as,
“…. intellectually dumbing down the task…”
~ David Allen, ‘Getting Things Done’ book
I simply love that phrase.
Now, if you have been like me, you must have read tons and tons of article about GTD methodology and tried out various different variations. I particularly devoured the idea of ‘next action’ — because intuitively I realized that there is a ingrained power in this concept.
However, I struggled quite long to fit into my own ‘workflow’.
Coach Tony’s rambling about ‘first action’ offered a rare insight to me though he might not have intended it to be.
Fighting Resistance
You see, like everyone else I had my own serious issue (even still do now) on resistance I develop for a task — particularly a very very important one. The more the task sits on my to-do list, more the resistance grew.
