[sgoody]

I know there's a lot of this kind of advise out there and I find most of it works fairly well. I think that for people who have a problem getting things done, the main issue is just not having any way of tracking things at all.

I don't follow any methodology as such, but one thing which did help me was reading a tiny bit about the Pomodoro stuff. Basically the thing which absolutely kills my productivity is context switching. i.e. starting one thing, then breaking off to do another. What I take away from the Pomodoro stuff is that I should not work on anything for less than 20mins and that time should be carved up into 20min chunks.

In practice all this means to me is that I try not to get distracted by other things and if somebody attempts to get my attention I'll get them to wait until I've completed the thing which I'm at task on.

I don't do anything by strict structure, so everything's subject to changes, but I try to be careful to allocate a minimum amount of time to things and I try to make a todo list. In my private life I use toodledo, which gives me decent views by due date/urgency/context/folder. At work, I'm using a mix of Gmail stars, Gmail tasks and proprietary apps, though in the past I have just used a single .txt file.