What the Action Item Tracker does
Paste an action list and this tracker answers the three questions that matter at the start of a meeting: what is late, what is coming, and who is carrying too much. It works from four fields - owner, due date, status and the date the action was raised - and produces overdue and due-soon views, load per owner, ageing since the action was raised, and a Markdown agenda you can paste straight into the next invitation.
It is deliberately strict about status. "In progress", "wip", "ongoing" and "started" all fold into one value, because a list with four words for the same state cannot be counted. Done actions are never shown as overdue; cancelled ones are excluded from the completion rate rather than quietly counted as successes.
How to use it
- Paste the list, one action per line:
ref, action, owner, due, raised, status, source. Only the reference and the action are required. - Set the date to treat as today - useful for preparing a meeting pack in advance - and the look-ahead window for "due soon".
- Read the overdue count first, then switch tabs to see the open list, the coming week or everything.
- Check the load per owner and the ageing chart. An action open for more than ninety days is usually a project, a decision nobody wants to take, or something that no longer matters.
- Copy the agenda or download the CSV for the next meeting.
Reading the results
Overdue counts only live actions with a date in the past. Anything done or cancelled is excluded, which is why a completed action with a passed date does not appear in red.
Ageing runs from the date the action was raised, not from its due date. An action re-dated three times still shows its true age.
The completion rate is done divided by everything except cancellations. Counting cancelled actions as completions is the commonest way action lists flatter themselves.
Actions with no due date can never appear as overdue, which is exactly how lists quietly rot. They are flagged separately for that reason.
Worked example: a team list on 21 September 2026
Eight actions. A4 is done and A6 cancelled, leaving six live. Two are overdue: A1 - send the revised quote to Kestrel, owned by Sam, due 10 September - is eleven days late, and A8, confirming the training dates, is five days late. A4 also has a date in the past, but it is marked done and so is never shown as overdue.
A2 is due on 25 September and A7 on 24 September, so both appear in the seven-day look-ahead. A3 is blocked with a date five weeks out, which matters more than its date: a blocked action with no named blocker is simply a stale one.
A5 - replace the printer in accounts - has no owner and no due date at all, and was raised on 1 May: 143 days earlier. It lands in the 91+ ageing bucket and is flagged twice, once for the missing owner and once for the missing date.
The completion rate is one done out of seven counted actions, or 14% - cancelled A6 is excluded rather than counted as a success. Sam carries two of the open actions, including one of the overdue ones, which is why his row sorts first in the load chart.
Why ageing beats due dates for spotting rot
A due date can be moved. An action raised in May, re-dated in June, July and August, and due next Friday looks perfectly healthy on any list sorted by due date - and it is the single most dysfunctional item in the meeting.
Measuring from the date raised makes that visible. The ninety-day threshold is a convention rather than a rule, but it is a useful one: almost nothing that genuinely takes a quarter to complete belongs on an action list rather than in a project plan.
Blocked is a status, not an excuse
Blocked actions are counted separately because they behave differently: they age like open actions, but chasing the owner achieves nothing. What they need is a named blocker and somebody with the authority to remove it.
If an action has been blocked for more than a couple of meetings, the honest options are to escalate it, to re-scope it, or to close it. Leaving it blocked indefinitely trains everyone to ignore the list, which is the only genuinely irreversible failure mode here.
Limitations: what the result does not prove
- It reads the rows you paste and nothing else. It cannot check whether an action marked done was actually done.
- There is no storage, no sync and no reminders. Download the CSV and keep the list wherever your team already keeps it.
- Due dates are treated as calendar dates. Working days, holidays and part-time owners are not taken into account.
- It measures the list, not the work. A list with nothing overdue can still be a list of trivial actions while the real problems go unrecorded.
Privacy: where your data goes
Everything you paste, type or drop is processed in this browser tab. It is not uploaded, logged, stored or sent to analytics. Session recording and tag-manager scripts are switched off on this page.
Standards and sources
- ISO 8601-1 - Date and time: basic rules - checked 19 Sep 2026
Frequently asked questions
How should an action item be written?
As one named person, one verb and one date: "Sam to raise a purchase order with the second supplier by 25 September". An action owned by a team, or with no date, cannot be chased, and this tracker flags both cases separately.
Why are completed actions not shown as overdue?
Because the date has stopped mattering once the work is finished. Showing closed items in red makes the overdue count meaningless and trains people to ignore it, so anything marked done or cancelled is excluded from the overdue view.
How is the completion rate calculated?
Actions marked done, divided by every action except cancellations. Cancelled items are excluded rather than counted as completions - counting them is the most common way an action list flatters its own performance.
What counts as a stale action?
Here, more than ninety days open since it was raised. That is a convention rather than a rule, but it is a useful trigger: something that genuinely takes a quarter usually belongs in a project plan rather than on a meeting action list.
What do I do with a blocked action?
Name the blocker and name who will remove it, then treat that as the action. Blocked items still age, so leaving one blocked across several meetings is the same as abandoning it without saying so.
Can I use different status words?
Yes - common synonyms are folded automatically, so wip, ongoing and started all become "in progress", and closed, complete and finished all become "done". Anything unrecognised raises an error rather than being silently counted as open.
Is my action list uploaded?
No. It stays in the browser tab: no upload, no storage, no analytics on the content. Action lists name colleagues and customers, which is why this one never leaves your machine.
Last reviewed by the A2Z.Tools team against the sources listed above.
