The Action Method

At Matizmo we are great believers in getting things done. We wanted to share a method which helps us organise our thinking and, above all, gets us to take action. Unsurprisingly, it is called the Action Method.

The Action Method seeks to increase productivity by simplifying life. It works from the starting point that all things in life are essentially projects. Be they your marriage, your kids, finances, managing client A’s account, prospecting for new leads, finishing off design for Client B – each and every one of them and the rest of the interactions going on in your life are all projects. Only by seeing these parts of your life as projects are you are able to understand what you need to accomplish in each individual case. The Action Method helps you identify what needs to be done next to achieve this and, most of all, it encourages you to take action to do it.

Where we have found the Action Method particularly useful is in some of the practises it promotes. For example, it identifies that email is a time thief and while regular communication is great, action is the nub to getting on. Another example is acknowledging that it is very difficult for people to separate “work” and “personal” tasks and that to induce an anxiety free life, doing things in the matter of importance – be they “work” or “personal” is what is going to make an individual more effective.

The Action Method is available online as a tool to help you organise what needs to be done. Centred around the mantra that the “Action Step is the hero of the Action method” it allows you to assign action steps to each of your projects. These action steps always start with a verb – call Steve, send book to Paul, check contract etc. As the Action Method allows for greater collaboration – something we feel very strongly about at Matizmo – it also allows you to assign or delegate actions to others in your network. Leaders amongst you will be pleased to note that progress on delegated tasks can be checked.  The system is intuitive and easy to use so even the most technophobic can use it.

Creators of the Action Method, Behance, have also developed an app for the iphone and the ipad that can help you organise your life while on the go. Fully sync-ed with your online version, you have all the features you have online  – creating action steps, assigning them, nagging for a progress update – on your phone.

Backing it all up are the paper products they have to encourage you to stick with the method offline. These include action pads, action stickers and action cards. They are there to help you break down the project into actions and thus move it forward.

We like this method because it cuts out a lot of the chaff in business life. No more meetings for meeting sake or coming out of a discussion without a clear sense of how the project will be taken forward. The Action Method has allowed us to change our mentality and focus on action and outcome by slimming down processes.