The gospel of /u/ryans01. Helpful advice for anyone who wants to be more productive

Marc Andreessen’s anti to-do list is also good: write down what you just did, and then cross it off. Even if you get off track, this gives you a sense of what you were working on and your progress.

Part of the problem here is an unhelpful assumption that you begin each morning in a sort of ‘productivity debt’, which you must struggle to pay off through hard work, in the hope that you might reach a zero balance by the evening. As a counterstrategy, keep a ‘done list’, which starts empty first thing in the morning, and which you then gradually

If not, allow me to introduce the Rule of 3: at the start of each day, choose the three things you want to have accomplished by day’s end. While a to-do list is useful to capture the minutiae of the day, these three intention slots should be reserved for your most important daily tasks.