A distinction that sounds pedantic and turns out to be the difference between a system that produces momentum and one that produces waiting. **Goals are outputs. Actions must be inputs.** An output depends on someone else's behaviour. An input is entirely within your control. ### **What I'm thinking about** 1. **The worked example is the whole idea** – Goal: reach $5m ARR this quarter. "Close X customer" is an **output** — you do not control whether they sign. "Send a proposal to X customer" is an **input** — you control it completely. 2. **The test is whether you can complete it alone** – If your next action requires another person to respond, it isn't an action. It's a hope with a due date. Rewrite it until it's something you can finish without anyone else's participation. 3. **Why it matters mechanically** – "This ensures that you are never waiting on someone else to take the next action." A list of outputs produces a status meeting full of blocked items. A list of inputs produces a list of things that either happened or didn't, for reasons you own. 4. **It changes what accountability means** – You cannot fairly hold someone to an output; too much of it is outside their control, and everyone knows it, which is why output-based accountability degrades into excuse-swapping. Inputs are cleanly assessable. 5. **It pairs with compression** – Once written as an input, shrink the first step until it fits in two minutes. "Send the proposal" is two hours of work, so the actual next action is *"Schedule two hours to write and send the proposal"* — ninety seconds, doable now. ### **So what?** When reviewing anyone's action list, including your own, the single highest-yield edit is to find every item whose completion depends on another party and rewrite it. Most missed actions are not discipline failures. They are actions that were never actionable. Related: [[Bias to Action Is a Two-Minute Rule]] [[Top Goal]] [[Directly Responsible Individual]] [[Impeccable Agreements]] [[Executive Operating System MOC]]