I’m sure I’m not alone in spending more time building structures to be productive than actually producing. I’m always trying to find ways to “trick” myself into getting things done, with varying levels of success.
For me, it’s always a struggle to keep going with anything once the novelty wears off. Finding new ways to structure and gamify work helps for a while, but very few things stick more than a few months. That said, every once in a while I find a thing that does become an actual tool in my toolset. I’m thinking specifically of Pomodoro timers for me. If I don’t want to spend too much time hyper focusing, the intervals help me break out and evaluate, rather than working for 9 hours and forgetting to eat.
It’s been useful and I remember to implement it, I don’t have a ton of tools of strategies like that. What tools or strategies both work for you AND you seem able to actually implement them reasonably consistently?
Bullet Journal — the original method described by Carrol, not the fancy spread-and-decoration bullshit. Write everything down as it occurs to you, indicate whether it’s a note or a to-do with different bullet points, and at the end of the day decide which tasks to put in tomorrow’s notes and which to discard. Date each page and list the page number in the index of it contains long-term notes (eg. quite from a contractor, birthday present ideas).
It’s easy, it’s fast, and it doesn’t break if you forget to do it for a day or two or two hundred.