What's the next action? Tim Pychyl's question for a stuck task

On The One You Feed (episode 257, 2018), psychologist Tim Pychyl of Carleton University told host Eric Zimmer about a complaint he kept hearing. In his book he had told readers to "just get started", and people answered that if they could just get started, they wouldn't have a procrastination problem. So he went looking for something more useful, and found it in David Allen's idea that we don't do projects, we do actions. Pychyl's version is a single question: what's the next action?

I keep that action as small as possible.

Tim Pychyl, The One You Feed, 2018

His aim, he said, is a threshold so low that you look at it and think: who couldn't do that? When Zimmer described a plan to run two miles by the lake at 6 p.m., Pychyl pointed out that "two miles" can itself be the barrier. His alternative was to decide that the moment you get home from work, you put on your running shoes and walk back out of the door. Ten minutes later, he added, people are often running happily.

Why vague tasks stall

Zimmer gave his own example in the same conversation. "Record video" sat on his to-do list for ages because it was really eight or nine tasks: write the script, get it reviewed, practice, set up the lights, record, edit. With no obvious first move, the whole thing stays parked. Pychyl agreed, and said that in his research, uncertainty goes with procrastination.

The wider research supports making the start concrete. A review of 94 tests found that people who decide in advance when, where and how they'll act reach their goals more often than people who only intend to, with a medium-to-large effect (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006). The next-action question supplies the "how" part of that plan, at a size you can face.

Pychyl added a balance worth keeping in mind. A task has to be meaningful enough to want and manageable enough to do. Shrink it too far and it can feel pointless, so some days you need to remind yourself why it matters, and on others you need the next small step.

How this fits the Stop procrastinating program

In the 1h Protocol to Stop Procrastinating, learners whose answers point to the Stuck pattern (the task is too big or too vague) start by making the next move obvious. Everyone writes the next step for their own task, and the second paid chapter walks a whole start, from the evening before to the evening after, with five minutes to begin. If the task still feels too big on the day, the plan falls back to the very first move. The first chapter is free.

Source: The One You Feed, episode 257: Being a procrastinator with Tim Pychyl (2018) Research: Gollwitzer & Sheeran (2006)