YataThe next visible physical activity to move something forward.
Next Actions have a pretty intuitive definition. How strictly you follow it would depend on your needs and preferences.
As a contrived example, “Do taxes” may be perfectly actionable and clear, and so you might store that as a Next Action rather than a 📥 Capture.
However, if you ever find yourself rethinking similar thoughts related to an action, chances are your subconscious is unsatisfied with your current definition of the action. Extending the example, you can’t do your taxes without some necessary documentation from your bank, so you may feel more at peace if the next action is to “download tax info from mybank.com”. In fact, the original action of “Do taxes” may be better suited as a 🎯 Project instead.
Properly defining Next Actions requires deliberate thought and takes effort, but assuming it’s something you plan to do, the thinking has to be done eventually. Define it once and your subconscious will (hopefully) not bother you about it again.
Assign 🏷️ Contexts to further define Next Actions
Given a list of actions with the appropriate context(s) attached, you can easily filter out actions that aren’t relevant, and focus only on what can be done at the present moment.
Consider the trade-off between the time/effort required to perform an action immediately and the overhead of tracking it, when considering if the action is worth postponing
For example, David Allen recommends a threshold of less than 2 minutes.