What is GTD next action?

GTD next action is a concept in personal epistemology: Each step in a workflow should be small enough to complete without ambiguity.

Example: A content team has a publishing workflow with a step labeled "Prepare the article for publication." Three different editors interpret this differently: one checks grammar only, another also reformats images, the third also writes the social media blurb. When articles go live with broken formatting or missing social copy, no one knows where the process failed because the step was too large to diagnose. They replace the single step with five atomic steps — copyedit prose, resize and compress images, write meta description, draft social excerpt, preview in staging — and the errors become immediately locatable because each step either happened or it did not.

This concept is part of Phase 41 (Workflow Design) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for workflow design.