Haha, as a student with ADD, this completely describes who I am. I actually have lots of other tips I've gathered over the years - maybe I'll finally compile them somewhere.

http://matt.might.net/articles/productivity-tips-hints-hacks-tricks-for-grad-students-academics/ is also a really good resource

My philosophy: Optimize transaction costs Distilled into empirically-wrought principles, my high-level advice is:

Reduce transaction costs to engaging in productive behavior. Erect transaction costs to engaging in counter-productive behavior. Minimize opportunity cost. Do what you're best at doing, and partner with specialists when you need to do something else. [This is the hardest principle for engineers to accept. We feel that if we can do something, we should.] In short, mold your life so that the path of least resistance is the path of maximum productivity.

People are shocked when I tell them I'm lazy. I don't try to change the fact that I'm lazy; I exploit it. I try to make sure that the laziest thing I can do at any moment is what I should be doing.

As an anecdote, I'll offer my experience with doing pull-ups. I wanted to start doing pull-ups, so I attached a portable pull-up bar to the door outside our bedroom. Every time I passed by, the transaction cost of a pull-up was near zero, so I did some pull-ups. Moreover, I didn't have to remember to do pull-ups, because I saw the pull-up bar all the time. One day, for whatever reason, the bar was taken down and placed on the floor. It's been on the floor for months, and I haven't done a pull-up since. It would take about ten seconds to re-install the bar, but I'm often in a rush, and that ten seconds has become a transaction cost.

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