The time has come for the last part of the trilogy. Today we will talk about actions.

Action is what you do according to your plan to achieve your goal.

Some people start taking actions before choosing a goal and/or creating a plan. Don’t be one of them! Always stick to the correct order:

1. Choose a goal
2. Create a plan
3. Carry out an action

When you are doing something to achieve your goal the most important measure of your actions’ efficiency is how much progress in your plan they produce.  In this regard I can distinguish three types of actions:

1. Actions that move you forward in your plan. This is the right type of action. You know that all of your actions have to be under this category.
2. Actions that don’t move you forward or only move you a little bit forward in your plan. Most of our actions tend to be this type of action. Try to increase the efficiency of these actions or avoid doing such things.
3. Actions that move you backward in your plan. Usually such actions are just stupid things, you must always think before doing something.

Keep in mind a few tips while deciding on what actions to take:

1) It is better to take many small actions rather than taking one big action. Why?

There are two reasons:

• It is easier to allocate time when you plan small actions. By small actions I mean an action that doesn’t take many resources to complete. One of such resources is time. Everybody only has 24 hours in a day and most of us are busy all day long. When a person sees that an action will take an hour and he/she only has 30 min, he/she won’t start the action at all!
• You won’ get a mental block that will keep you from starting an action. Some people, including me, have difficulties starting to act when they realize that that it will take a lot of their effort, energy, and time. The first step is the most difficult and that is why we need to simplify it as much as possible.

2) Keep track of how efficient your actions are. It is vital to measure and track efficiency of your actions because most of our actions are inefficient. To raise the overall efficiency of realizing your plan you must regularly revise your plan searching for most advisable and efficient actions.

Thank you for reading!

-O.

Identifying what action type listed above your actions belong to will help you figure out which actions to focus on to get the best result.  You would obviously never want to do an action that falls in the third category (one that moves you backwards) intentionally unless you had a really good reason to do so.  I agree that many of the type 3 actions can be eliminated with proper foresight. However, it is very important to realize that progress especially big progress is rarely completely linear. Sometimes all the planning and foresight in the world can still result in bad actions.  The important part is to be able to identify these actions and learn from them and eliminate them. If you do not pay close attention to the types of actions you do, you are liable to keep on doing these negative actions and may miss a good learning opportunity that could result in far superior actions.

-T!