I like the advice to "start your day as early as possible, even if you're not a morning person." I'm definitely not a morning person, but he's right that it feels so good to have accomplishments done early in the day. Need to do that more often.

Another one of his points is similar to Randy Pausch's advice to "eat the biggest frog first."

Second the advice about early starts. Engineering and then grad school inevitably turned me into an insomniac but my productivity since I had to (more like was forced to) start waking up early as increased a lot.

And re: "Find poetry in the humdrum". If big chunks of your life regularly feel humdrum, you're either doing it wrong or doing the wrong thing.

Let's see: meet my self-imposed deadline, or read The Art of the Self-Imposed Deadline? Tough choice.

The third suggestion about making the parts of a project get shorter and shorter so that you feel like you are making progress is really smart. I'm definitely going to try that.

Could anyone offer more advice for making self-imposed deadlines stick?

Maybe defeats the object of 'self-imposed' but tell someone else what your deadline is. Make yourself accountable. Have a cost of failing to meet it even if it's the guilt of telling someone else you failed.

Here's what works for me:

Keep a SIMPLE running list of tasks in a plain 'ol text file and sort them by priority. If you find yourself "spacing out", grep the list for the easiest thing you could possibly do and do it immediately. This often get your engine running.

Assign specific times for surfing and goofing off. Give yourself one hour in the morning to check email/news/blogs/etc... and don't surf again until lunch. Another hour or so, max, and then back to work. It's amazing what you can accomplish when you aren't reading about other people's great accomplishments.

Reconsider blogging. Yes, I know, this is heresy. However, I found that it was really hurting my productivity, and my desire to create a great blog post was sucking time away from creating a great app.

Challenge yourself. If you are feeling frustrated, pick the thing you've been avoiding like the plague and attack it. Tell yourself that you aren't stopping until it's dead or at least extremely subdued. You'll feel so good at the end that everything else will seem easy.

"Reconsider blogging. Yes, I know, this is heresy. However, I found that it was really hurting my productivity, and my desire to create a great blog post was sucking time away from creating a great app."

Using your own advice,("Assign specific times for surfing and goofing off. Give yourself one hour in the morning to check email/news/blogs/etc... and don't surf again until lunch. Another hour or so, max, and then back to work.") one could just allot a couple of hours a week to blogging and thus avoid it becoming a productivity sink ;-)

Agreed. You just have to set priorities and know yourself. My "goof-off" time is mostly used for research on various topics and that takes priority over blogging for me.

Try telling people about them; it will motivate you. Also, when you write down things to do, try to write down the smallest possible parts of the item as a task and don't include things like "think about," "decide," etc.

i.e.:

bad: 1. create concept for new message queuing 2. implemeting queuing better: 1. design message header 2. write message header parser 3. write a message pump 4. etc

The early or late point is debatable, but the other three bits of advice are great. That one about about breaking up the project so that each step is smaller than the last makes so much sense. You have to reorganize the way you do things probably, but it seems like it will pay off in the end. I am going to try it.

Nothing new here. I've been following these guidelines and others for years as a telecommuter. Each person works differently, some do well starting early and others staying up late. I think that consistency is the real key -- stick with a schedule even when you hit the 80% blahs.

I am using these guidelines, starated today. I got a lot accomplished. Let's see how well it holds up. There's bad consistency and good consistency.