Best Tools For Tracking Action Items

At Less Meeting, we’re huge fans of getting things done. Creating action items is easy; finishing them is the hard part.

While over 63% of professionals create to-do lists, a paltry 11% finish the tasks they plan to do each day. You ran a good meeting and the team walked away with a solid list of to-dos. Two weeks later, at best half of them are done.

Before we get to the tools, a quick look at why action items stall, and what gets them across the finish line.

Why action items don’t get done

1. Procrastination: why do today what you can put off until tomorrow? When people get overwhelmed by tasks, they keep pushing them off.

2. Forgetfulness: people forget. A lot of the time, it’s the to-dos they owe you that slip their mind.

3. Prioritization: there aren’t enough hours in the day, and people will inevitably prioritize differently than you do.

How to get action items done

1. Simplify the task: make the action item as small and specific as possible. “Plan next month’s sales conference” is overwhelming; “Pick a date for the sales conference” is something someone can knock out today.

2. Remind the person: it’s fine to send a nudge. Don’t email every hour, but a gentle reminder after a few days is fair game. Better still, get a tool to do it for you. If someone owes you an action item, Less Meeting automatically reminds them in their Daily Digest.

3. Own the prioritization: be crystal clear about when you need it done and why it matters. That’s what turns a vague request into a commitment.

One more thing: a to-do list is the right home for assignments and action items specifically. With an action item, you don’t get to decide whether it’s important once it’s been agreed on, so a list is a must for keeping it on the radar even when it’s not top of mind.

The best tools for tracking action items

Once you’ve got the habits down, the right tool does the remembering. The best choice depends on where the action item came from and where the owner already works.

Meeting-native: Less Meeting

Best when the action item came out of a recurring meeting. You set the owner and due date while the meeting is still going. From then on Less Meeting sends the owner reminders, and if the item isn’t closed by the next occurrence, it carries forward into that meeting. Items also sync to Google Tasks and Microsoft 365, so owners see them in the list they already use.

Personal task lists: Google Tasks and Microsoft To Do

Best for individual owners. Google Tasks is free and built into Gmail and Google Calendar. Microsoft To Do replaced Outlook Tasks and sits inside Outlook, which most large companies already run. Both sync with Less Meeting. Neither knows which meeting a task came from, so nobody gets reminded at the next one.

Project tools: Asana, Jira and Basecamp

Best when the action item is a piece of project work that needs a home in the backlog. They’re heavy for a quick “send Dana the revised numbers,” and meeting context tends to get lost on the way in.

CRM tasks: Salesforce and HubSpot

Best for sales reps, since the task sits on the deal or contact it belongs to. Less useful for anything that isn’t tied to a customer record.

Whichever you pick, the tips above still apply. Keep them in mind next time someone owes you a to-do, and you’ll clear a lot more than 11% of your list.

If you’re evaluating software specifically for this, see what to look for in action item tracking software, including how carry-forward and automated follow-up compare to the tools above.

Whatever tool you land on, someone still has to send the email when an item slips, and we have five templates for that. If the same items keep resurfacing meeting after meeting, that’s a carry-forward problem, covered in how to carry action items forward across recurring meetings.

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