The strategies I’ve collected here represent a greatest hits of sorts, culled from my years of experience battling distracting task lists. This advice is unified by the notion of containment. Several of these ideas focus on containing the overhead tax of tasks you cannot avoid tackling. In many cases, it’s not the actual execution of a small commit

Here’s what most people miss: it’s not enough to simply divide tasks into smaller pieces—you then need a system for managing those pieces. Otherwise, you’re just creating a lot of extra work for yourself trying to keep track of them.