1. Eat That Frog
Do the most difficult or the task you hate the most first. I guess this is against popular advice but this truly works. Your mind is the most fresh when you are starting out, and getting that one tough thing out of the way leaves you with much more motivation to carry forward with the other simpler ones. The frog analogy comes from the assumption, that people hate eating frogs.
2. Wear a cap
This is something that I have just discovered. There is no better work setting than putting on a low set cap, with your headphones over them. The idea is to restrict your field of view and focus on the task at hand. If only there was something which could tune out the multiple opened tabs #wishful thinking.
3. Ambient noise is good
Believe it or not, moderate ambient noise is proven to boost creativity. An environment like a coffee house is proven to increase your productivity. And this app called Coffitivity does just that.
4. When you are tired, push yourself to do one more thing
It’s the end of the day and you just want to wrap it up. Or it’s the middle of the week and you don’t feel particularly inspired to work and want to just leave. A simple hack is to push yourself to do just one more thing. More often than not, you will find yourself back in the zone. One more thing works magic for a few people, so why not you.
5. Just start doing, it is OK for the first draft to be crappy
The writers among you would probably agree with me on this one. The first drafts are always crappy - they don’t have to be grammatically correct. My first drafts usually are just random keywords joined together. The first drafts are more like an empty playground for your ideas, let them play around and mingle with each other.
6. Keep your goals to yourself
Derek Sivers has delivered a very solid TED talk on this. The idea is that when you tell someone what you want to do, say lose weight, more often than not they would congratulate you for taking it up. That is the validation and ego boost why you wanted to lose weight in the first place. So, your plans and resolutions are best kept to yourselves.