[gberardi]

I have been getting decent mileage out of this tip: keep a list on a notecard of anything non-productive you think to do. It's related to the "schedule time off" tip, I think. You basically tell your brain that you will do the fun thing (or other urgent/important thing) later.

Let's say you are trying to work at your computer, and you want to read these forums for an answer to a post you made earlier in the day. Well, don't do it now! Just write down that you want to do it on that notecard. For every action that tempts you, write it down and tell yourself that you will do it later when you are finished with what you are doing right now.

Then, once you are finished, look at the list, and do one or all of the entries.

It goes along with David Allen's research that your brain is only capable of thinking of ANYTHING as urgent. If you write down EVERYTHING in a place that you know you will check, your brain can settle down and focus on the task at hand.

So if you need to write a blog post, but you think about checking your forum post, your google adsense revenue report, your email, and the fact that you wanted to talk to your children about drugs, your brain will be jumping from one thought to another, making you distracted and lowering your productivity. If you write down everything you have to do on a notecard, and you know that you will do everything on that notecard, your brain can relax. It won't worry that anything will be forgotten, and it will allow you to focus on your blog post.

The trick, of course, is making sure that you DO check that list! Otherwise, your brain will realize that it is not a reliable method and will continue to worry. This is why David Allen says that Weekly Reviews are a requirement. You need to be able to consistently let your brain know that you have an always up-to-date list of projects and next actions so that it doesn't waste cycles trying to remember multiple things at once for you and can get to productive work.