Use What is Left of this Year and Start Ticking Some Boxes
We are nearly 2015, only one month to go. And remember the long list of things that you wanted to do for 2014? Yeah, I know you ignore it and probably all of us tend to forget about it too, till we finish the year and start looking. Ohh, shoot, what have I done, I did not do any of these things on my list.
So, I thought about this 3 weeks ago, and started thinking, how could I use what is left of this year and turn things around, or at least make things better :). In these 3 weeks, I have tried 2 things, which I would like to share with everyone here, hoping that they might help somebody else.
First
I have abandoned my long to-do lists. Every day/week I used to come up with these lists and try to cross items off. It just did not work for me. I keep having things coming up, things not fully finished, and so on. What I have done instead is just to focus on ONE thing at a time. Whenever I remember something that I need to do, I just take a note of it on my phone, and when I have a moment just do it.
Second
The second thing I did was switching off all notifications on my phone and computer. This is funny when it comes from a mobile software developer, who works with notifications and builds them for apps and people all the time. But seriously, I was finding it very hard to focus. I always get distracted by so many things poping up and not getting much done. This time what I am doing is focus on ONE thing and nothing else and put a time-box for myself (30 min, 1 hr, etc). I even used an extension for Google Chrome called Time Doser. This helps you create time boxes for your tasks, very simple, but the impact is quite powerful. And the other good thing about switching off notifications is that it saves you lots of power (battery life) on your mobile phone, which most people struggle with :D.
That's all, I hope that this would be a good call for you to sit down and look at your 2014 To-Do list, and ask yourself. What is the one (or two) thing(s) that you really want to do this year? Start focusing on one thing at a time, and you will start noticing some progress (hopefully :) ).