What is an Action Item? (+ How to Track Action Items Effectively in Business Meetings)

What are our action items from today's meeting? Do you have any action items from the call with the CEO? Did you take action on all the items we discussed with a prospect? These kinds of phrases come out all the time in day to day conversations in business. But how many of us actually know what an action item is? If you're someone who's new to the space, or maybe you've just never heard that term before, it might be a little confusing. You might be thinking, what is this all about? If you are in that camp, you are not alone. Actually, action items, at their core are just a fancy word for a task. There you go. Secrets out. As with most things that are confusing in business, it comes down to us trying to feel fancy when we're talking about a simple concept. It's not as sexy to say, do you have any tasks from your discussion with the CEO? Nah, we need to be cool. We're going to say, do you have any action items from that discussion with the CEO? Action items, just like tasks, are broken down into two to three pieces. These pieces would be what needs to happen, who's gonna do it, and if you're a little bit more on top of it, when is it gonna be done? Basically, task fundamentals, but putting them in the little pretty package we've got. An action item. Typically, action items, unlike tasks, will be the term we use when we are talking about tasks that come out of a conversation or a discussion. Basically, you put two humans in a room, they're both talking about a bunch of things, and at the end of that discussion, someone will likely say, here are our action items. In other words, here are the next things, the next tasks that need to happen as a result of this discussion. Action items can be a great way for you to clarify expectations for next steps and make it really clear what action is going to happen based on the discussion you just had. It's useful to use action items when you find yourselves brainstorming or going down rabbit trails or talking about many topics, when potentially what one person understands to be a concrete next step might not match the expectation or understanding of another people per people person of the other person in the room. Pretty much anytime you have two people talking to each other, there's going to be miscommunication. So taking the time to clarify these tasks or sexually clad action items, you can make sure that everyone's clear on what's happening after the call ends, the meeting is concluded or so on. Action items can be used in just about any avenue where people are working together. You might see it in a sales call with something like this phrase, thank you so much for meeting with me today. I'm going to be sending you a proposal of all of the stuff we discussed here so we can start the project tomorrow. Can't wait to hear from you. That sentence, which you could hear at the wrap up of a sales call is essentially us concluding action items. We are saying what we're going to do, who's going to do it and when it is going to happen. We're clarifying expectations so the other person knows that we're taking things on and the ball is in our court. While you can also hear action items used internally, when you're in team meetings and you want to wrap up what the conclusions are, you can also have action items used in marketing or in external resources, such as in a YouTube video where someone might say, hey, you, you should hit subscribe to this channel if you like this content. So that way you can have this content show up in your YouTube algorithm without you having to do more work. Do that now. You know, for example, that is also me clarifying an action item. Unlike the more traditional examples of action items, both of these sales and in this case discussions here use action items in conversation. So we're not like, boom, action item mode. No, no. We're just saying, hey, here's what's happening next. Still an action item just talked about in a slightly more organic way. As long as we're clarifying who needs to do something, what they need to do, and if we want to be more detailed when they do it, we have basically accomplished action items in a nutshell. Now, before we wrap up, I want to just go over some quick mistakes when it comes to action items. In case this helps you down the line, here are five common mistakes I see when it comes to action items, number one is missing pieces of it. I already said that action items are just tasks, but just like tasks, to have a task, we need clarity around all two, if not three of those pieces. Who, what and when. If you're creating action items and you're saying, hey, John, do you mind developing that website? That's kind of an action item. But because we're not clarifying our timeline, it could be a little better. For another example, let's picture we're in a brainstorming meeting and we say, oh my goodness, I love all of these branding ideas. These are fabulous. Let's decide on what's going to happen by Friday and have a decision by next week. Notice the problem there? Yeah, we Had a what, we had a when, but we didn't have a who. Just like tasks, I do believe action items tend to work best when there is a singular owner. One person responsible saying we're going to think about it, we're going to decide that is not going to happen. You can have people give feedback, but ultimately we need one person responsible, responsible for getting the thing done, even if that means they have to work with others to make that happen. We need one party who's going to make sure it gets over the finish line. Missing who, what or when all or some of these pieces is one mistake I see with action items. The second mistake I see happen fairly often with action items or tasks in general is using journey based terms rather than destination based terms. That's a fancy way of saying you're not clear. Okay, if we are going to break down our what of what we want to have happen as an action item, what we want to make sure there's a shared understanding of what that result, what that what looks like. Okay, so phrases like think about, discuss, consider. Those are great verbs. They're verbs. Congratulations. But how do we know when we're done? We don't. So for many cases it's not going to serve us well to have action items using these journey based, never ending, open ended kind of verbs. If we want to have a clear action item using things that are outcome oriented, result oriented or destination oriented is going to serve us a little better. Rather than think about all the possibilities, we could have summarize our top three choices rather than discuss all the possible marketing names. Marketing names, that's weird. Brand names. Let's do that. Instead of think about all of them, we could decide on them. Rather than learn about, we could have complete this course. Anything we can do to add a little bit of clarity will help us out here. As with other examples though, if you have a higher skill person you're working with, you may not need to be as clear. They'll just, you know, clarify that for themselves. But particularly when you're talking in mixed groups where you're working with folks all over the delegation spectrum just breaking down that what into a specific outcome, you can know when you are complete can go a long way to ensure that you're not seeing somebody trying to learn about a topic for 40 hours when your expectation of learn was that they would watch one YouTube video. Clarifying that is going to help you out later on. The third mistake I see with action items is using them in not enough places. Action items, as I've Shown in the demonstrations or examples throughout this video. They can be useful anytime you have two humans or more discussing things. Heck, even if you're talking to yourself as a person and you're discussing things with yourself, you might want to use action items. That's because our human brains are a mess. And if there's one thing I can guarantee, it's when you put multiple people in a room together and you talk to each of them individually after asking them what happened in that room, they are each going to have different answers. Because our brains, our audio, visual, everything, the way we experience the world is different per person. So regardless of the type of meeting, utilize action items. So many folks will only use action items in a formal project management meeting led by the operations manager. Bullshit. I mean, we don't need to. We don't need to keep this as an operations only thing. Based on the examples I showed you earlier, you can clearly see how we can use action items in sales situations. We can use action items in one on one coaching experiences. We can use action items in again, discussions with ourself or discussions with our spouse. Anytime you want to have clear expectations of what's happening next, throw these into your conversation. They don't need to be formal or fancy or, you know, OP six Sigma certified. Just make sure you work them into your rhythm. The next mistake I see come up is confusing the term action items with items to discuss and action plans. These terms come up quite a bit and for some folks it can kind of trip you up in your steps. Remember the golden rule of business, which is that everything that we could possibly give a fancy name, we give a fancy name to. So when you hear these phrases, don't let them get you all worried that you don't know what they mean. You do, just not by the term they're using. Action items, as we've already discussed, is just a fancy word for tasks following a discussion. Items usually given in a meeting context, simply means topics, things that are being discussed. Stuff that has come up that warrants a discussion usually is called an item in a meeting. Item could also be a fancy word for thing. So action item, get it? Action thing. Additionally, action plan. The other term that sometimes gets people confused here, action plan is just like a cluster of activity, a group of tasks, a to do list, a project plan. All of these things are in the action plan category and all that means is a group of stuff. More than one action item. It's a collective effort of action items that are moving us towards a goal to achieve a project or an outcome. Just to put these in context, you could have items that are being discussed in a meeting, and then the items you need to take action on become action items. And when you have a lot of action items, you might turn that into an action plan, meaning a bunch of stuff that's all working together. Got it? Three fancy pieces of jargon that really aren't that fancy that I don't want you to be confused about. Now that brings us to our last example, our last mistake when it comes to action items, which is not having action items as part of your process. Now, you may not have noticed, but this channel is called ProcessDriven, so I pretty much had to throw this in here. But all of the stuff I told you about capturing tasks, who, what, when all of these things, this is not something you should just be memorizing. For some of you, sure, you'll memorize it because you're just that good. But for most of us mere mortals, when we're in a meeting and we're having a great discussion or we're talking with a prospect and we're excited about their new project, our brain isn't immediately going to think, oh, I need to capture action items. I need to say those out loud. It's just not how our brain's wired unless we get a lot of practice. So to help us out and to avoid this mistake of just forgetting to mention action items, we want to make action items a part of our rhythm. Easy way to do this for meetings especially is to have an agenda. For your meetings, even it's just three bullet points. And make sure the last step of your agenda always says next steps and action items like one, one line there. This visually being on an agenda, even if you don't use it for anything else, will be a visual reminder to cue you so you can remember to say, ah, here's what happens next. Once you start incorporating action items into your meetings, you facilitate or attend. You don't have to be the facilitator to throw this in. This will allow you to have this become more of a habit. And over time, you may not need the agenda because it will be part of your operating system. But until then, having this part of your process, particularly if you are a team leader, facilitating a group can go a really long way in ensuring clear expectations for everyone and in every meeting that you have or participate in. Here at ProcessDriven, the way we incorporate action iteming into our process is by having a clear action grabber note taker for every meeting. Having an action tracking area for every meeting and quickly turning those actions into tasks in our project management system during every meeting. Super simple to do. Takes about two to three minutes per meeting. Nothing crazy and ensures that this action item stuff doesn't just become discussion points, it actually translates in to items we take action on. I know, comes full circle just like that. Now if you're someone who's watching this and thinking, ooh, this is interesting. I never thought about action grabbing as a thing I need to have in my business. What else am I missing? Check out the description below because we've got A list of 109 common processes that people tend to forget. But when set up in your business and institutionalized in some ways these topics of process can become really valuable ways to have your operations flow a little more smoothly and with a little bit less chaos. So free resource for you there in the description if you want to check that out. However, for many of you you're like, okay, I'm not sure about all of this yet. I just want to figure out how to implement this into my business. If that is you, check out this video next. I have a video where I go through how we implement our meeting action grabbing flow here at ProcessDriven while walking you through our all team meeting agenda so you can get some inspiration that you can quickly implement into your next ALTI meeting. Thanks so much for watching guys and until next time, enjoy the process and check out this video. Bye.