My best productivity hack has to be the "million dollar idea list" that is SEPARATE from my daily to-do list.
Every time I have an idea now, I force myself to put it on that list, and if I'm still thinking about it in 2-5 days, then I'll allow myself some time to explore it further.
It has saved me hours a week. I used to explore an idea immediately for up to an hour, sometimes more, and all that time is lost because several of the ideas shouldn't have been allowed even 2-seconds.
Just this morning I've set up a wiki for myself to help with this problem.
As ideas come in, I'll post them to the front page under "free floaters" (working on quicksilver action for that right now), then as they start to form or as I do research, I'll start fleshing out the pages for each idea.
I'm hoping the wiki aspect will also force me to look at how individual ideas might be related. I'm thinking of it conceptually as a mind map that changes with time.
I'm not sure if MediaWiki has the ability to view those relationships at a high level, but if not, I'll write something that does.
very similar idea here. I also run a mediawiki wiki on my laptop, and my pile of ideas is in a template I call the idea garden. The front page of the wiki is a pile of templates: to do list, idea garden, and a subject-matter-specific meta template that has two levels of links into all the other areas. Been using it for over a year now, swear by it. SVN and PHP are not cool, but it works, and that counts. BTW, what plugins are you using? I'm using
* SpamBlacklist (just in case)
* ConfirmEdit (just in case)
* Cite
* Parser Functions
* FCKEditor
* Quiz
I'm getting mediawiki and plugins through mediawiki svn, and apache, php, postgres, etc, from macports. You?
I haven't yet looked into the plugin's available, but I'll check out the ones you mentioned.
I've installed PHP, MySQL, and MediaWiki from zips/installers on a Windows server I have access to so I could hit it from any of my computers or (eventually) phone.
I guess I could have set it up at home, but I don't like keeping my computers on 24/7. I'm considering getting an Asus EEE box that supposedly only needs 20W, so I may revisit that in the future.
Every time I have an idea now, I force myself to put it on that list, and if I'm still thinking about it in 2-5 days, then I'll allow myself some time to explore it further.
It has saved me hours a week. I used to explore an idea immediately for up to an hour, sometimes more, and all that time is lost because several of the ideas shouldn't have been allowed even 2-seconds.