Actions are CoachAccountable’s way of helping coaches structure action plans with their clients and manage completion between sessions.  Actions recently got a big leg up this week with the addition of Action Projects.

An Action Project is a way to group related actions under the banner of a single project:

How close is the project to being done? The progress bar gives the overall picture.

Tying a new Action to a new (or existing) project is a snap.  Just choose an existing project from the drop down menu, or create a new one simply by giving it a name:

When an action is part of a project, weight is relevant.

“Weight” is simply a way to tell CoachAccountable how much a given action contributes to the overall progress of the project.  Effectively, it dictates how big a slice of the progress meter should be filled up when the action is marked complete.  Actions that are more important and/or entail more work should be given greater weights, and quicker or less significant Actions get smaller ones.

You can think of weight as being on a 10-point scale, but really they can be represent whatever scheme of weighting you like.  For programming projects where features to-be-built are contract line items, I like to make actions that mirror the line items with weights that match the dollar amount of those line items.

The progress meter is cool because it gives a visually satisfying look at how much is done, plus it’s fun to watch the meter fill up in the moment an action is marked complete.

Hover your mouse over any of the completed slices of the progress meter to see details about the corresponding action:

Hovering reveals an associated color for the completed action: red means it was done late, yellow, a little late, and green on time.

By editing the action project you can set a description for it, as well as set weights and update due dates in bulk for all of the Actions in the project:

The due dates of already-completed Actions can’t be updated, but their weights can be.

For my sake I already really like Action Projects: to queue up related actions into 2 or 3 projects is a major leg up from having a big, interlaced list of to-dos, organized only by due date.  To see the progress bars of each and recognize at a quick glance both how far we’ve come and how much further there is to go for a given project is super satisfying for me as coach, and my clients like it as well.  After using them for a few weeks, a big list of standalone Actions seems almost primitive by comparison.

I’m happy to report that already others have similarly weighed in.  L. T. from Australia writes:

Well done on the projects, makes working with businesses so much clearer!

and M. M. from Texas says:

Totally love the new Action Projects! :-)  Congratulations.

Enjoy!