Distill Conclusions Into Action Items #

We spend so much time on a day to day basis on brainstorming new ideas, getting a buy-in from someone, clarifying misunderstandings, mentoring a more inexperienced team member among many other topics we discuss with our team, our bosses or external vendors. Now, everybody is happy because we can continue to work.

But, this effort goes to waste more times than we would like to admin because nobody takes action because they thought somebody else would take action. This happens because in the moment we all have all the context of the conversation and the commitment is still fresh in our memory but as soon as we get back to the things we were doing the things that were so clear a moment ago start to get blurry and entangled with everything that we have going on.

Action items, a one phrase that describes a single action we have to take, solve this problem by creating a list that can be referenced later on to keep ourselves and others accountable. They also serve as a distilled version of the conclusions of the conversations that you and others just had which help to provide more context to the conversation. By being this clear on what needs to be done, we avoid situations like “We thought it was the other’s team responsibility” or “I didn’t know you needed this today” or “I didn’t understood this but that” which delay projects by either not having things on time or building the wrong things which required extra time for rework.

A side effect on writing down the action items, especially your own, is that it shows you have been paying attention to the conversation and that you have initiative to take action not waiting on the sidelines until somebody tells y ou what to do and personally driven to do good work.

The time we take to ideate and plan a project, and the effort we put in to work on a project is too precious to not take another 5 to 10 extra minutes to write the necessary action items in order to avoid going in the wrong direction and realize it halfway through the project or even worse, when it is too late to course correct.