Yesterday’s post was about getting you to take action, some action – ANY action, to jump-start achieving your goals. I’m sure the response of some, perhaps many, was “Where do I start to take action?” That’s understandable. Most of the time when we need to take action to get things moving, we are paralyzed by not knowing which action to take. We get caught up in the paralysis by analysis syndrome because we want to take a good action, one that will produce results.
That’s totally understandable.
But there’s some illogical assumptions there. First, all actions are going to produce results. If you don’t get a result, you either didn’t really do anything or your actions were WAY too small. Second, actions in the context of our goals are rarely good or bad. Obviously, we leave out the unethical and immoral actions you can take. I am guessing if you’re here, you’re not going to take those kinds of actions. In this context, it’s the results of our actions that need to be judged. Are the results moving us toward or away from our goals? Is the progress we make big or fast enough for the effort we put into them?
So, we need to evaluate based on results, but still we need to know where to start. There’s two schools of thought on this. The first is that we should take actions only on our biggest and most important goals first. This should give us the biggest return on our time and effort after all. The second school of thought is that we should take small actions that produce immediate results. These allow us to take more actions in a smaller amount of time and build up momentum and progress in multiple areas.
Neither approach is always the right way.
When you’re stuck in paralysis mode or lost in a state of drift, not knowing what to do, then almost any action is better than none. Take the smaller, quick actions that allow you to have some wins. Get them under your belt and move on to bigger ones. When you’re in the groove, transition to the big actions with the greater impact. Ultimately, they are the best use of your time anyway. When in the groove, doing those big, high-impact actions, we sometimes have some downtime or periods where we don’t have the time or other resources to always stay on the biggest, most important task. In those cases it’s the best time to knock off some smaller actions and tasks that move you forward.
Taking action shouldn’t be over-analyzed. We get trapped into doing only the perfect and make an enemy of the good. Our actions have to be balanced between what has the greatest long term impact, what affects us the most today and what we can actually get done. If we aren’t able to take a particular action right now, then we have no business trying it until we’re ready for it.
Once you get back into the action habit, you can try to decide the best action. Until then, just about any of them are the candidates. The best action ends up being the one you actually take.
