As both programmer and marketer, I have been plagued with productivity issues all my life. I have the problems most people have, but I have them a bit worse; when I have to do something, I postpone it.

But I don’t just postpone it; I can tell my brain it is almost done, while it is not at all done. I go around telling people it is almost done and, as a consequence, work myself into a kind of pickle. A pickle which causes a lot of stress. Because you make expectations for people that cannot be met; they think you are almost done, while you have not even (or just) started.

Usually I get things done actually, in the end. And when the deadline is really pushing, I just work myself crazy and finish it.

With marketing stuff, this is not so bad; I just postpone it, get less visitors and/or less money. I can live with that; with programming it is bad, because programming jobs are underestimated anyway, the timeline to finish them is shifting rapidly and the urge to get them done diminishes while the urgency grows rapidly.

To fix this I had to kick myself and get into gear. And ofcourse find some tech way of solving it as I am a gadget/software/web/tech person. I also am a programmer and I need things to be flexible and configurable. All the time and everywhere.

This basically means simple todo lists do not work for me. They are too simple and do not allow me to work effectively. That is the technical side of things.

Mentally, I just don’t look at todo lists, calendars and so on; they are extremely boring to me. I put stuff in the Google Calendar. And just don’t look at it. Ever. At all.

I put stuff in rememberthemilk and then I forget about it.

But I thought of some way to solve this all, and I can tell you; it works like a charm. Really amazing that I never did this before.

1. Per type of task (software project, choir, marketing thing), I create a specific list in flexlists.com; the system is very flexible and allows me to make the list exactly as I want it, without the rigidness of traditional todo lists, really rocks for productive people
2. Every morning when I get up, I put Todo items for that day into the lists; I can put items for following days as well and make a filter for today ; same thing. Notice that I put everything in there; take a shower, do shopping, program a new feature to xxx, make a blogpost about enhancing your productivity
3. During the day, you work through all the points
4. After a point is done, you set it do ‘Done’ and archive it

That’s all.

But no, that is just a To do list; that doesn’t work for me as I said already.

The ‘magic’ things for me are ;

1. I Do Not Stop Until All Points Are Done.
2. I Cannot Be Interrupted By Anything During A Task, however urgent and whatever it is (even food, sleep etc)
   

So no sleeping, no going out, no adding new points (like going out), until all points are 100% done. You have to do that rigidly for this to work. And it does work.

The first few days you put too many points on, and you’ll sit working till 4-5 am without sleep and food. But you’ll get better; you put smaller and less points on. Eventually you get to fill your entire day as you want it and have time for nice things.

How to prevent putting very little and only nice things on? I guess that is your personality; I do want things done and I do want too much, every day. My problem was, it somehow didn’t get done. If you have the problem that you don’t know what to do, that’s a different thing.

This works for me, hope it helps you as well.