Actions lead to clarity and save time
Goshido is cloud-based software that allows you manage and share all of your actions – “chunks of work”. Actions are like tasks only better. When everyone is focused on actions, work flows and you can accomplish the extraordinary.
An action can be as simple as a question or as complex as a two-year project. In the example above, Pauline is looking at her action inbox and she’s received 5 actions and 37 updates. If this were email, she’d have 42 emails and the actions and updates would be mixed together. In Goshido, she can go straight to the actions, the things she needs to do. She can quickly triage each action:
- Complete it – if it can be done immediately
- Decline it – if she is not the right person to do it
- Defer it to a plan – today, important, urgent, pending or someday
- Create a sub-action – break it down into sub-actions which she could delegate to other people
- Comment – all of the people involved will see the comment
So much time in modern organizations is wasted managing email or in meetings discussing status. In Goshido, you can focus first on the actions – the things you need to do. Meetings are more effective when people capture the actions that need to happen. Actions captured in Goshido provide status updates to everyone who was at the meeting.
In decentralized organizations, actions make individuals accountable to other individuals. Michelle in sales can send an action to Ron in marketing without going up through the management hierarchy. Actions and decisions can be made at the most effective levels of your organization.
Projects are cascades of actions
Projects are special kinds of action in Goshido. You can connect actions together into projects that can evolve and grow as they progress. You can get a real-time status report of what’s happening at all levels of your projects.
You can sub-divide any action (or project) into a number of sub-actions. Those sub-actions can in turn be sub-divided into more sub-actions to as many levels as you want. In effect, a project of any size can become a cascade of actions that map to a work-breakdown-structure (WBS). In Goshido, you can run many small informal projects or huge complex and mission-critical programs.
In the example above, a six month project “New customer service website” has been sub-divided into a number of sub-actions (the high level milestones). The first milestone “Create First Prototypes” has in turn been broken down into actions that are owned by each team leader. Each team can in an agile way break down their milestone into sub-actions. You can sequence the actions at any level (by drag-and-drop) giving you and your team simple but powerful workflow capabilities.
Breaking an action down into the simplest sub-actions or next steps helps people avoid procrastination. You can navigate your way down through the actions in the same way you can browse files and folders in a computer. You can get a summary dashboard which counts the actions at any level in the project. Issues deep in the project (actions without an owner or scheduled too late) can surface on this dashboard. You can get all of the updates for a project giving you a real-time status report of everything that’s happened at any level.
Projects in Goshido can expand to any size and we provide features that allow you to filter the information so you don’t get overloaded. At a glance, you can see who’s doing what next.
Plans help people focus
When new actions arrive, you can quickly plan them (Today, Important, Urgent, Pending, Someday). You can use plans to escape the tedious cycle of handling one urgent (but unimportant) task after another.
“Most things which are urgent are not important, and most things which are important are not urgent.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
At the start of each day you can select actions from your important and urgent plans and move them to “Today”. As you work through your day, you can reorder your plan by drag and drop. As you organize and complete your daily actions, this generates valuable information for your co-workers. They can see what you’re working on (if they have access to the action). You get a peripheral vision of the work people around you are doing.
- The people you work with, can see how you are prioritizing your work.
- When you put a plan together at the start of your day, you feel calmer, more focused and you’re more likely to achieve your goals.
- When new actions arrive, you can quickly plan them. You’ll have peace of mind knowing they are queued and waiting for you.
- You can ensure important actions are not forgotten in the deluge of short-term requests.
Capture actions from your existing tools
Goshido is all about easing the strain of email. However, we do provide some simple email integrations. Goshido sends you an email when you have an action that is ready to be completed.
You can create new actions by sending emails to Goshido. Imagine you are in your email inbox and someone sends you something actionable. You can reply, CC action@goshido.com, include a special tag and Goshido will create the action for you.
You could be reading twitter or a blog post on your smartphone. From most Twitter clients you can email a tweet. In this case, mail the tweet to “action@goshido.com” and it will become an action in your inbox. Next time you are in Goshido you can move it to a project or plan it for later.
See something interesting on the web that you want to take action on later? We also provide a button that you can install on your web-browser toolbar. Select some text on any page, click on the button and you can create an action in Goshido with your selected text and a link to the webpage you are on.
Next Steps
Goshido is a simple but powerful system that helps you and the people you work with to be more effective. To learn more:
Read more – why Goshido is different or