MMA productivity: meetings, messages, then actions

You can finish a day with a shorter task list and still have neglected your most important work. The report is polished, the new feature works, but tomorrow’s meeting is unprepared and an important customer is still waiting for a reply.

The MMA productivity method establishes a deliberate order: meetings first, messages second, actions third. Developed by Chris Fox, it puts people at the centre of prioritisation and connects everyday work to the strategic outcomes it should serve.

The hierarchy gives you a starting point for deciding where your attention belongs. Applying it well requires judgement about commitments, dependencies and consequences.

What is the MMA productivity method?

MMA stands for three connected types of work:

• Meetings: conversations where people identify problems, explore possibilities, build relationships and make decisions.
• Messages: communications that arrange those conversations and move work forward between them.
• Actions: execution work that fulfils commitments and delivers agreed outcomes.

These activities form a cycle. A message leads to a meeting. The meeting produces a decision and an action. Completing the action creates something to communicate or discuss.

MMA asks you to prioritise that cycle from the people involved and the commitments you have made.

Before choosing a task, ask: Which conversation or commitment most needs my attention, and what work will make it successful?

Meetings first: plan around your commitments

Meetings have a particular feature that many tasks lack: an agreed time involving other people.

If you have committed to discussing a proposal at ten tomorrow morning, your preparation has a deadline. Leaving it until tomorrow afternoon defeats its purpose, however good the eventual work.

Meetings can also be where important strategic work happens. A customer explains a problem you had misunderstood. Colleagues challenge an assumption. A partner agrees terms. A team resolves a disagreement that has been holding up delivery.

Giving meetings first priority means taking responsibility for making these interactions worthwhile.

Start with the week ahead

Review your diary before filling the spaces around it. For each meeting, consider:

• What outcome or decision do we need?
• Is there a clear agenda?
• Who needs to contribute?
• What must I read, investigate or produce beforehand?
• When will I do that preparation?

A meeting without a useful purpose should be questioned. Some can be shortened, combined or handled through messages. The hierarchy depends on the value of the conversation, rather than the mere presence of a diary invitation.

Preparation deserves its own time block. If a Thursday discussion depends on analysis, that analysis belongs in your plan early enough to inform the discussion.

How StratNav can help with meetings

StratNav’s calendar views help you see both the meetings ahead and those you have recently had. This makes it easier to plan preparation around real commitments, rather than discovering them only when the reminder appears.

The meeting tools can highlight forthcoming meetings without agendas and past meetings without minutes, helping you spot gaps before they become missed opportunities. When you are preparing, StratNav’s AI Agenda Writer can take account of your strategy, the outstanding actions connected to it and the people attending, so that the agenda focuses on the decisions and commitments that matter.

Afterwards, StratNav can help you turn the conversation into useful records and follow-through. Its integration with transcription tools such as Read.AI can bring a transcript into the relevant meeting, where StratBot can help draft minutes, identify insights and extract proposed actions. You can then review what was actually agreed and carry accepted commitments forward into execution.

For more on translating conversations into decisions and accountable follow-through, see how to run effective strategy meetings.

Messages second: keep other people’s work moving

Messages connect meetings and sustain progress between them. They clarify questions, establish expectations, share evidence and help people act.

An unanswered message can conceal a dependency. You may see a request sitting in your inbox; the sender may see a decision they cannot make until you respond.

That makes message handling part of execution.

The difficulty is that messages arrive through dispersed channels. Email, messaging apps and platform notifications may each suit different relationships. They also create several places where important work can wait unnoticed.

Prioritise by consequence

MMA requires a reliable way to distinguish important messages from noise.

Useful questions include:

• Is someone blocked until I respond?
• Does this affect an approaching meeting or commitment?
• Is there a customer, colleague or relationship consequence to delay?
• Does the message concern a strategic priority?
• Would a short acknowledgement establish a realistic expectation?

The loudest notification does not necessarily deserve the next response. Nor does every message require a complete answer immediately.

Sometimes the useful response is brief: confirm that you have understood the request, identify what you need to resolve it and say when you will return to it.

You can do this at planned intervals. Constant interruption would make the actions those messages depend on harder to complete.

How StratNav can help with emails

Email need not remain separate from your strategy. You can email StratBot to update your strategy when a colleague sends additional data or a progress update. You can also ask a question about your strategy by email, then review, edit and forward the response when someone needs a clear, strategy-aware answer.

StratNav’s email stakeholder bookmarklet can take you from an email directly to the stakeholder records for people mentioned in it. From there, you can see the strategy items, initiatives and actions with which they are associated. That makes it easier to understand why a message matters before deciding how to respond.

When you need to keep people informed, you can also email stakeholders directly from the page in StratNav where they are recorded as stakeholders. This is useful when a decision, action or other strategy item needs a targeted update rather than another disconnected email thread. Learn more about keeping stakeholders in the loop.

Actions third: deliver the work that matters

Actions turn decisions into results. Their position in MMA reflects the need to choose and sequence them in context.

There is an understandable attraction to work you can complete independently. Building something, improving a document or fixing a small problem offers visible progress. You control the process and can see the result.

Preparing for a difficult conversation or replying to an ambiguous message may feel less satisfying. Yet either could matter more.

Consider an illustrative situation: you have two hours available, a customer discussion tomorrow and an unanswered question from a colleague preparing the proposal. You could spend those hours improving an internal dashboard. But resolving the question and preparing for the customer may have a greater effect on the outcome.

The dashboard work could still be valuable. The question is whether it deserves those particular two hours.

Actions also need a clear strategic connection. What goal does this serve? Which initiative does it advance? What evidence supports doing it now?

StratNav’s guide to goals, objectives, KPIs, targets, initiatives and actions explains how these elements connect. Those relationships help you assess whether a completed task represents progress towards the result you want.

How StratNav can help with actions

In StratNav, you can record an action against any relevant element of your strategy: an insight, goal, initiative, meeting, decision, issue or risk. This makes the action easier to prioritise because it remains connected to the outcome it is intended to support.

Actions can also be created from meetings and emails. As noted above, StratNav can extract proposed actions from meeting transcripts and carry accepted commitments forward. StratBot can also help create actions and reminders from the strategic context you provide.

You can assign stakeholders to actions in different roles, using RASCI to clarify who is responsible, accountable, supporting, consulted or informed. Set a due date, and StratNav will remind the relevant people when it falls due. Its action management tools also let you link each action to the people, meetings and strategy elements that shape its delivery.

That gives you a way to follow actions through without losing the relationship, commitment or strategic priority that made them important in the first place.

Use the hierarchy with judgement

A useful prioritisation method must accommodate circumstances.

An urgent operational problem may demand immediate action. A concentrated period of work may be necessary to meet an existing commitment. Your available energy may make one task feasible when another would be poorly handled.

MMA provides a default order against which to test those choices.

When you depart from it, make the reason explicit. Are you responding to a deadline, preventing a serious consequence or using a limited opportunity for focused work? Or are you avoiding a conversation?

That distinction matters.

Repeated exceptions can also reveal something the system is missing. Perhaps preparation time is consistently underestimated. Perhaps your strategic priorities need updating. Perhaps the messages you defer require a kind of judgement that is difficult to exercise between meetings.

Reviewing those patterns gives you evidence for improving the method.

How AI can support meetings, messages and actions

AI and automation can support each level of MMA while leaving people responsible for commitments and decisions.

Meetings: preserve attention and capture outcomes

Transcription and summarisation can reduce the effort of reconstructing a discussion afterwards. Subject to appropriate consent and handling, a transcript can provide material for draft minutes, insights, follow-up communications and proposed actions.

Those outputs still need checking. A suggestion is not an agreement, and an inferred action is not necessarily an accepted commitment.

The benefit is more capacity to listen during the conversation and follow through afterwards.

Messages: support triage and clearer responses

AI can help summarise long threads, identify questions and draft responses. Useful triage would take account of the people involved, approaching commitments and strategic relevance.

It should help you see why a message matters. You still need to judge the response, particularly where the relationship or issue is sensitive.

Actions: delegate suitable execution

AI agents can undertake suitable, clearly bounded work, such as preparing a first draft, assembling information or carrying out defined steps.

Delegation needs an expected result and an appropriate review point. Its value in MMA is the capacity it releases for conversations, decisions and relationships that need your attention.

Connect your attention to your strategy

MMA points towards a broader opportunity for StratNav: connecting people, meetings, messages and actions within the same strategic context.

StratNav already provides strategy planning and execution tools, including meeting management, stakeholder management and action tracking. Its business strategy platform overview describes those capabilities.

The opportunity is to make the connections between these activities more useful for prioritisation. A meeting would show the strategic issue it needs to resolve. A message would carry the context of a relationship or commitment. An action would show the outcome it is intended to support.

With those connections visible, you could assess how you actually allocate attention: which priorities receive it, which relationships wait and where activity repeatedly displaces important work.

Start your next weekly review with your diary. Identify the messages and preparation needed to make those commitments successful. Then choose the actions that advance the agreed priorities.

To give that work a clearer strategic foundation, try StratNav free and connect your goals, initiatives and actions.