Easy, cached success spirals/gamification/HabitRPG: +4 (3 months). I think a significant amount of the benefit I derive is from having a small string of dailies that get done first (ish) thing in the morning, hence the success spiral. Having mental checkpoints for when each daily is “late” helps me keep track of when it’s time to move on to the next thing. Colorful clicky boxes and lighthearted 8-bit-esque graphics also help. The site is down with some regularity, but since I only need to refer to it a few times per day, I have actually found this to be barely any impediment to its overall utilty.
Recursive taskification, which I do with Workflowy +3 (2 months). When I’m not accomplishing much because I have multiple tasks with too many components to keep track of and I feel overwhelmed, Workflowy’s endlessly nestable and rearrangeable items encourage me to just record any relevant task without getting hung up on the “but what if I put something in the wrong category” mental block. (I think this tactic and Workflowy would be worth more points if I had more complicated tasks on a regular basis.)
Making a Schedule +5 (6? months). Sometimes thoughtfully organized to break up active and sedentary tasks, but even when not thoughtfully organized at all, offers a small amount of pressure to be doing something in particular while at the same time making answering “so what am I supposed to be doing?” easy.
Easy, cached success spirals/gamification/HabitRPG: +4 (3 months). I think a significant amount of the benefit I derive is from having a small string of dailies that get done first (ish) thing in the morning, hence the success spiral. Having mental checkpoints for when each daily is “late” helps me keep track of when it’s time to move on to the next thing. Colorful clicky boxes and lighthearted 8-bit-esque graphics also help. The site is down with some regularity, but since I only need to refer to it a few times per day, I have actually found this to be barely any impediment to its overall utilty.
Recursive taskification, which I do with Workflowy +3 (2 months). When I’m not accomplishing much because I have multiple tasks with too many components to keep track of and I feel overwhelmed, Workflowy’s endlessly nestable and rearrangeable items encourage me to just record any relevant task without getting hung up on the “but what if I put something in the wrong category” mental block. (I think this tactic and Workflowy would be worth more points if I had more complicated tasks on a regular basis.)
Making a Schedule +5 (6? months). Sometimes thoughtfully organized to break up active and sedentary tasks, but even when not thoughtfully organized at all, offers a small amount of pressure to be doing something in particular while at the same time making answering “so what am I supposed to be doing?” easy.