Five strategies to help you stop overloading your workday. --- Francesca’s patterns of overcommitment revealed five elements of magical thinking about her time — traps that many of my clients fall into. We devised antidotes for each. 1. My heavy workload is just temporary. 2. The next time will be easier. 3. I will collect immediate rewards. 4. Others will follow my instructions. 5. Without me, this work will be poor quality.

Create Alfred workflows with ease.

More about being continually creative than general productivity/getting work done, but still good tips. When trying to build a rock-solid routine, it is a question of when and not if you will face an unexpected obstacle.

Naming a project is always an awful experience.

I need to make writing something besides a daily referendum on my worth as a human

SelfControl is a free and open-source application for Mac OS X (10.5 or above) that lets you block your own access to distracting websites, your mail servers, or anything else on the Internet. Just set a period of time to block for, add sites to your blacklist, and click "Start." Until that timer expires, you will be unable to access those sites--even if you restart your computer or delete the application.

Whose mercy are you at, and why? Is it a very good reason? In that complex equation of getting big things done well, why not value a good night’s sleep, time with your family, or a drink with a friend?

- Consuming more than you create - Watching your own vanity metrics - Starting the day responding to others - Prioritizing the wrong activities - Relying on multi-tasking to 'save time'

This is important.

‘Easy scheduling.’ Create a poll, invite participants, and everyone agrees on the times they can meet. Brilliant. Via Merlin Mann in the 'Back to Work' podcast.

Combine this small, easily customizable AppleScript with a keyboard shortcut utility (like FastScripts) to quickly toggle an application forward and back. I use this for Terminal and TaskPaper.

"It seems the message of this research for those seeking to establish a new habit is to repeat the behaviour every day if you can, but don't worry excessively if you miss a day or two. Also be prepared for the long haul — remember the average time to reach peak automaticity was 66 days." I wonder if it takes just as long to break a habit?

Noticing a theme here? I'm having serious productivity troubles right now, and I'm trying to trick myself out of them. "The philosopher Mark Kingwell puts it in existential terms: 'Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing… Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.' In that sense, it might be useful to think about two kinds of procrastination: the kind that is genuinely akratic and the kind that’s telling you that what you’re supposed to be doing has, deep down, no real point. The procrastinator’s challenge, and perhaps the philosopher’s, too, is to figure out which is which."

"If you want to work on big things, you seem to have to trick yourself into doing it. You have to work on small things that could grow into big things, or work on successively larger things, or split the moral load with collaborators. It's not a sign of weakness to depend on such tricks. The very best work has been done this way."

"Capable psychonauts who think about thinking, about states of mind, about set and setting, can get things done not because they have more will power, more drive, but because they know productivity is a game of cat and mouse versus a childish primal human predilection for pleasure and novelty which can never be excised from the soul. Your effort is better spent outsmarting yourself than making empty promises through plugging dates into a calendar or setting deadlines for push ups."

Written with the opinion that this is necessarily a Bad Thing. Revisit; this is interesting.

This is exactly why Instapaper is so incredible: "Instapaper makes me more productive, everywhere. On my desktop it dismisses distractions. On the go it transmutes idle time to knowledge. It remembers things I forget, but it has never become a new todo entry on my list. If all my apps had this power, I would be utterly unstoppable."

Great, of course.

"Freedom is an application that disables networking on an Apple computer for up to eight hours at a time." Only restarting can circumvent the time limit you've sent.

Stressing the importance of actively engaging everything that you take in and the way that you take it in, so you can synthesize and maximize and!

On "shortening your workweek" in every way: outsourcing, clever promotion techniques, social engineering, and focusing on the right things.

On why entrepreneurs and health food nuts are living right, and cubiclones are missing something. "In an artificial world, only extremists live naturally."

Or so says this guy. Basically, stop feeling sorry for yourself and getting wrapped up in your moods -- just go go go!

On programming well. Devote time to it, rewrite it completely, work without distraction. Echoes of "Getting Real."

A list of online collaboration tools.

Some people with too many emails to handle have chosen to give up on the stack entirely.