Actionable Tasks vs. Passive Advice
As we get closer to launching a closed Alpha version of Ativiti, we’ve been trying to take how-to blog posts and figure out how they would translate into “Guides” in Ativiti. Luckily for us, dozens of how-to posts are written every day, with titles like 10 Steps to Getting a Job Through Twitter, Top 10 Ways to Save Money in a Recession, and How to Film Customer Case Study Videos.
Reading through dozens of posts has raised a big question in our minds: what makes something “actionable”? Can all the author’s suggestions be acted upon immediately? Are some intended for the passive reader - either contextual advice for specific situations, or habit-forming advice?
The conclusion we’ve come to is that there is a huge difference between actionable to-dos and passive advice. Something is actionable when it can be immediately turned into a concrete task with a clear way to identify when that task has been completed. In Penelope Trunk’s blog post on How to Beat the System to get a Great Job, a bunch of her recommendations are actionable:
- Identify and start working on a project that will boost my resume
- Find someone else’s project or business to work on for free
- Search for other resumes that reflect what kind of job I want and adapt mine accordingly
On the other hand, the rest of her items are passive advice - something you carry with you and attempt to turn into a habit over time.
- Execute a project until it’s good enough (contextual advice)
- Exhibit patience (habit-forming advice)
These are intangible - you can’t put them in a task list today and check them off tomorrow.
There is a risk associated with not acknowledging the difference between actionable and non-actionable tasks. If passive tasks are disguised as actionable ones, you will struggle to get through your to-do list and recognize a measurable impact on your productivity. Don’t get me wrong - intangible advice plays a major role in our personal and professional growth over time. I consume blog posts written by entrepreneurs and VCs with the express purpose of slowly adopting their perspective and habits as my own. But these posts often won’t help with the specific tasks I have to accomplish when I get to work tomorrow.
Ativiti is trying to do for how-to guides what Bloomberg did to financial news. Bloomberg structures and filters disparate sources of financial news and data into actionable insights for traders, portfolio managers, and research analysts. Similarly, Ativiti will structure project recommendations (which can appear in the medium of a blog post or magazine article) into projects that can be executed repeatedly and successfully.
One Step at a Time
When I think of my things-to-do backlog, I can’t help but notice a pattern: They are all multi-step actions, i.e. projects, or actions that would take more than thirty minutes. Here are a few examples,
- Align service score metrics in every operations report
- Plan my birthday party
- Book a cruise vacation
They are easy to say, which I believe is the reason they are easy to commit to! But once I’ve committed, actually getting it done becomes far more complex than I’d considered.
Scenario 1: One of a Kind Project
For some multi-part actions, such as #1 above, it’s very specific to my particular situation. My best bet is to break it down into sub-actions that can be performed sequentially, allowing me to break up the project into a few disconnected pieces of time.
Scenario 2: My Version of a Project Seen Many Times Before
Planning my birthday party is intimidating because there are some parts of it that will be very unique to this particular event. However, on the whole, it’s a fairly straightforward process that has been repeated by others countless times before.
- Find a date (of the calendar)
- Compose guest list
- Consider theme (this is where it gets personal)
- List possible venues
- Consider travel to/from venue
- Consider price per person vs. what you think is appropriate
- Contact venues and make a selection
- Contact guests and arrange RSVP (use evite? facebook?)
- List items needed for the party (cake, balloons)
- Acquire items needed for the party
- Party!
Scenario 3: A Project as Old as the Wheel
Other mega-actions, such as #3, Book a Cruise Vacation, have been executed very well by thousands of people before me. (Note, it is likely that these mega-actions have also been executed poorly in the past - whether it’s paying too much or booking a cruise targeted at seniors. Let’s not repeat any mistakes.) Whereas in scenario 1 I’m the best at designing my own solution, here it makes no sense for me to reinvent the wheel. Especially since when I think about how to best approach it, I’m so overwhelmed that I delay, delay, delay (also known as google - browse, google - browse, google -browse). I don’t know about you, but to me the idea of attempting to do something that has already been done is daunting. By the nature of me trying to reinvent the wheel, I’d surely end up with some 2000 BCE square-shaped piece of wood, rather than a Dunlop high speed, low profile run-flat (tire/wheel… whatever). Frankly, I’d be much better off buying the Dunlop. Likewise, rather than figure out how to plan my first cruise, borrowing a tried-and-true step-by-step approach would be very useful. In the 1900’s, we called this “using a travel agent.” But today, the idea of paying $200 commission for something that can be accomplished with some savvy web-surfing skills seems financially wreckless.
Ativiti will provide you the guides you need to get these Scenario 2 and Scenario 3 projects done, and get them done quickly, easily, and succesfully with the help of others who have done them before.
Checklists: Saving Lives, Winning Wars. What Can’t They Do?
The New Yorker had a great article last year titled The Checklist. It describes how organizations ranging from hospitals to the air force have effectively used simple checklists to solve major problems. Hospitals use them to enforce the steps for safely putting a line in a patient and avoiding infections. The air force used a preflight checklist to get thousands of Boeing B-17’s off the ground during World War II.
At its essence, a checklist helps a user follow the best practices for either a complex or a mundane activity by making explicit “the minimum, expected steps.” Ativiti is attempting to build off of this same insight by helping experts distill the knowledge they’ve acquired into actionable steps.
The checklist above got us thinking - what is the ideal action to put in Ativiti? Do we expect our users to check off when they wash their hands? Probably not (though when they do, we know we’ve hit the big time!). Jack Cheng’s post on Time on your side has a great heuristic to use: any task that will take between 5 and 60 minutes is a great candidate for tracking in your personal task list or putting in an expert guide for others to follow. Anything shorter, and the cost of capturing it isn’t worth it; longer, and you probably haven’t done a good enough job of breaking it into actionable steps.