The Importance of the Action Point

I’ve just finished reading “Making Your Ideas Happen” by Scott Belsky and I really recommend it. It deals with efficiency in the creative process, an interesting topic that most creatives struggle with.

One great take-out from the book, is to always create action points. It’s a technique you can use in various ways, but the easy way to describe is that your work should revolve and evolve around action points, meaning that throughout the day and in your meetings you need to capture stuff you can do and describe them with a verb.

An action point is not a project, it’s not “build a lego car”, it’s four action points:  ”locate store, buy lego, read the instructions, put the pieces together.” It’s an atom in a project. It’s taking the task down to the actual things involved in completing it. The verbs.

We all know that office meetings are huge time-wasters and might actually lead to nothing if you don’t write down actual action points and hand them out (and make people feel responsible for them). Stuff needs to happen for us to get somewhere, right? And these things don’t happen by themselves.

So make sure you and everyone in your team or project capture action points. They will make your life much more productive.

But where do you collect the action points? Do you use a notepad or a an app or what?

I love traditional notepads, but for this to really work in a digitalised world you need to find something that synchronizes across your devices (nice rhyme!). I have tried lots of different apps, Wunderlist, Things, and most recently Any.Do. They’re all good and synchronize from web, to Macbook app, to iPhone (or Android platforms). Make sure you really find it easy to use and enjoy the interface, otherwise you’ll get infected by the “lazybug” and stop using it.

Your action point list after reading this post:

* Share this post with all your friends.

* Download a todo-app.

* Write down a list of shit you need to do. Use verbs.

* Congratulate yourself.