What are Action Items?
Google Docs features an intelligent collaboration tool called “Action Items.” If you type a phrase like “Sarah, can you follow up on this?” or “Hey @John, please review the budget,” Google’s AI will parse your text, identify the name or email address, and automatically generate a popup suggesting that you formally assign that block of text as an “Action Item” to that specific user.
While this is great for project management, it can be highly annoying if you are simply writing a story, drafting meeting minutes, or noting down ideas where you happen to mention people’s names. Constantly clicking the little “X” to dismiss these AI assignment popups breaks your concentration. You can turn this intelligent parsing off completely.
How to Disable Action Item Suggestions in Google Docs
You can turn off the AI suggestions in the Google Docs Preferences menu.
- Open your web browser and navigate to any open document in Google Docs.
- At the top of the screen, click on the Tools menu.
- Scroll down the dropdown list and click on Preferences.
- A popup window will appear with two tabs at the top. Ensure you are on the General tab.
- Look down the list of checkboxes for the option labelled Suggest action items.
- Click the checkbox to remove the checkmark.
- Click the blue OK button at the bottom of the window to save your changes.
Once disabled, you can freely type names, @mentions, and task-related phrases without Google Docs interrupting you to turn your text into an assignment. You can still manually assign action items by highlighting text, right-clicking, and selecting “Comment,” then typing @username and checking the “Assign to” box.