Daniel Gross on productivity

The longer you think about a task without doing it, the less novel it becomes to do. Writing things in your to-do list and coming back to them later helps you focus, but it comes at the cost: you’ve now converted an interesting idea into work. Since you’ve thought about it a little bit, it’s less interesting to work on.

It’s like chewing on a fresh piece of gum, immediately sticking it somewhere, then trying to convince yourself to rehydrate the dry, bland, task of chewed-up gum. Oh. That thing. Do you really want to go back to that? “We’ve already gone through all the interesting aspects of that problem, and established that there’s only work left”, the mind says.

Stateless Browser

One day someone will make a to-do product that lets you serialize and deserialize flow, like protobuf. Until then, my solution is to (somewhat counter-intuitively) not think about the task until I am ready to fully execute it. I do not unwrap the piece of gum until I’m ready to enjoy it in its entirety. I need to save the fun of thinking to pull myself into flow.

• I try and respond to emails the moment I open them. If it’s something that requires desktop work, I quickly close the email.
• I don’t write down ideas for posts until I’m ready to write the entire post.
• I write down a few bullets of what I need out of a meeting, and then refuse to think about it until the actual event.

There are many more points at the link.  My classic line is simply “I’m not going to focus on that right now.”