Aaron Swartz在2005年写的一篇博文《HOWTO: Be more productive》。
Aaron Swartz 亚伦·斯沃茨，于2013年1月11日自杀身亡。他是一位程式师、作家、政治组织策划人和网际网路积极行动主义者，14岁参与创造RSS 1.0规格、与John Gruber共同设计了Markdown排版语言。 2011年7月19日他被指控自JSTOR非法下载大量学术期刊文章，并遭联邦政府起诉被捕，虽然JSTOR表示并无意对Aaron提起诉讼，但联邦检察官依然起诉了他。
文中提到了拖延，前几天纽约时报的一篇文章也讲到应对拖延策略：
策略一，拖延症患者甚少完全不做任何事情。雷蒙德·钱德勒(Raymond Chandler)的"别无选择"(Nothing Alternative)策略：他每天安排专门的四个小时，并遵循以下两条准则：a) 你不是非写不可。b) 你不能做写作以外的事情。
策略二，我们乐于去完成任何讨厌的任务，只是这能让我们躲避某些更糟糕的事情。在待办事项最首要的位置上，放两件令人望之却步的任务，然后，在待办事项列表再往下，写上几项能做到、而且确实很关键的任务。
策略二Aaron Swartz也提到了，叫做Create a false assignment，而且 Aaron Swartz说的更加深刻"convince yourself that it's fun. And if it isn't, then you need to make it fun."
高效之道
HOWTO: Be more productive
时间具有不同的品质，高效之道有二：
Time has various levels of quality...First, you have to make the best of each kind of time. And second, you have to try to make your time higher-quality.
其一，Spend time efficiently
Choose good problems...Life is short so why waste it doing something dumb? It's easy to start working on something because it's convenient, but you should always be questioning yourself about it. Is there something more important you can work on?
Have a bunch of them...Another common myth is that you'll get more done if you pick one problem and focus on it exclusively. I find this is hardly ever true...Having a lot of different projects gives you work for different qualities of time...It also makes you more creative. Creativity comes from applying things you learn in other fields to the field you work in.
Make a list...Integrate the list with your life...the best way to remember to look at it is to make looking at it what you would do anyway...
其二，Make your time higher quality
Carry pen and paper.
Avoid being interrupted...For tasks that require serious focus, you should avoid getting interrupted...Sometimes if you're really wasting time you should be distracted. It's a much better use of time to help someone else with their problem than it is to sit and read the news.
Eat, sleep, exercise...Time when you're hungry or tired or twitchy is low-quality time. Improving it is simple: eat, sleep, and exercise.
Talk to cheerful people...I always find myself much more inclined to work after talking to Paul Graham or Dan Connolly — they just radiate energy. It's tempting to think that you need to get away from people and shut yourself off in your room to do any real work, but this can be so demoralizing that it's actually less efficient.
Share the load...Even if your friends aren't cheerful, just working on a hard problem with someone else makes it much easier.
Procrastinatio...the more you try to go towards it the more it pushes you away...So what causes the mental force field? There appear to be two major factors: whether the task is hard and whether it's assigned.
对前者
Break it down...A task is a specific concrete step you can take towards your goal...You build up a momentum, each task leading to the next.
Simplify it...Writing a book seems daunting, so start by doing an essay. If an essay is too much, start by writing a paragraph summary. The important thing is to have something done right away...If your paragraph goes well, then maybe it can grow into an essay and then into a book, little by little, a perfectly reasonable piece of writing all the way through.
对后者
External incentives, like rewards and punishments, kills what psychologists call your "intrinsic motivation" — your natural interest in the problem...It even happens when you try to tell yourself what to do! If you say to yourself, "I should really work on X, that's the most important thing to do right now" then all of the sudden X becomes the toughest thing in the world to make yourself work on...It's very tempting to say "alright, I need to put all this aside, hunker down and finish this essay". Even worse is to try to bribe yourself into doing something, like saying "alright, if I just finish this essay then I'll go and eat some candy". But the absolute worst of all is to get someone else to try to force you to do something...So the secret to getting yourself to do something is not to convince yourself you have to do it, but to convince yourself that it's fun. And if it isn't, then you need to make it fun.
总结
The real secret to productivity is the reverse: to listen to your body. To eat when you're hungry, to sleep when you're tired, to take a break when you're bored, to work on projects that seem fun and interesting.
