I’ve been both a productivity pr0n consumer and a procrastinator for quite some time now - I discovered GTD back in my days at Nextel (so at least five or six years ago), and have tried and abandoned more task management software than I care to remember (I’m using The Hit List now, if that’s important to anyone). I’m usually pretty good about recording and planning next actions for projects, but I still sometimes fall down in actually doing those actions. Lately, though, I’ve gotten a bit better, and I owe that improvement to the Top Five practice.
Basically, I have a list of things to do/actions to take that grows and shrinks every day (through recurring tasks and whatnot), but averages somewhere north of 15 or 20 items. When confronted with such a big list, though, I tend to get stuck in the weeds, and spend too much time evaluating priorities. To avoid this difficulty (and to help trick myself out of procrastinating), every morning I pull out five things from the big list and write them in a notebook. That gives me a smaller target to focus on, and (so far) has resulted in many getting more things done, consistently.
