Open thread: How to get things done?!

We previously chatted about finding inspiration. Now we shall talk about getting things done. Not the actual book, but about what all of us do in order to move forward in our projects.

I am a mac user, and I use calendar app a lot. I have a couple (7 actually) different calendars, ranging from business tasks, to deadlines and personal plans. This has helped me stay on track with what I do, and make extensive plans up to almost 2 weeks ahead.

However, this didn’t work quite well, and just after this last Easter I ended up on the first working day with about 40 tasks to complete. That was obviously way to much I could handle, even if I had 10 employees. I ended up with those 40 tasks because I usually planned for each day much more than I could do. At the end of each day, all uncompleted tasks were postponed to the next day. In the long term, this technique proved very bad, but I switched it upside down.

Now, I pushed all my tasks to the end of the next week, picked the most important 5 of them, and moved them on the to-do list for today. Having the pressure off my shoulders, it turned out that all those 5 tasks were completed a couple of hours before my “working time” for today was over. I then looked and checked the next important task in the long list that was pushed to the next week. I did that task too, and repeated the process. When I finished work, and started writing this article, I realized I have finished 9 tasks, as opposed to 5 or 6 with my previous technique.

I think I got better results because I didn’t look ahead and try to multi-task. So, how do you do it?

Open thread: What do you do when you’re out of inspiration?

This doesn’t usually happen to me, but tonight it did. Perhaps there are some of you who have hit the brick wall before. What am I referring to? I am referring to those moments when you’re in the middle of a project, but you hit a dead end.

You may have been extremly excited when you first started it, but as you go deeper and deeper, you feel like the outcome is… well… crap.

My best solution is to get away from the project for at least 12 hours and then get back to it. The thing is that when I get back to it I have new, fresh, better ideas and there’s a big chance I might start the project from scrap again.

So, let us know how often do you hit that wall, and how do you get passed it? Or how to you bring it down!