Make time for the things in life that aren't work: family, friends, exercise, church, hobbies, etc. When I overwork I am generally given cause to regret it. (The others are more important to QOL, personally, but that exercise point is very important to stress. 45 minutes of exercise buys you an hour extra of productive labor, easily. I wish I could make that trade all day long, and I hate the actual act of exercise.)
Concentrate on small, achievable tasks. Do them regularly.
If it isn't worth $100 an hour it should be automated, outsourced, or eliminated. (You can move that number up as your time becomes worth more. I've always considered it a solid baseline.)
You can combine the techniques. I used to spend an incredible amount of time on content creation for my website. Conception, writing, HTMLification, etc would take me literally hours per page. I decided to eliminate (my involvement) by outsourcing the conception/writing and automating the heck out of the workflow.
This entailed moving my site from static HTML with a lot of handwritten content into a Rails-based pseudo-CMS with a lot of handwritten but machine-polished content. Downside: it is a lot more cookie cutter than it used to be. Upside: 2~4 hours of my time per unit of goodness is now 10 minutes of my time plus $100 per 30 units of goodness.
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Make time for the things in life that aren't work: family, friends, exercise, church, hobbies, etc. When I overwork I am generally given cause to regret it. (The others are more important to QOL, personally, but that exercise point is very important to stress. 45 minutes of exercise buys you an hour extra of productive labor, easily. I wish I could make that trade all day long, and I hate the actual act of exercise.)
Concentrate on small, achievable tasks. Do them regularly.
If it isn't worth $100 an hour it should be automated, outsourced, or eliminated. (You can move that number up as your time becomes worth more. I've always considered it a solid baseline.)
You can combine the techniques. I used to spend an incredible amount of time on content creation for my website. Conception, writing, HTMLification, etc would take me literally hours per page. I decided to eliminate (my involvement) by outsourcing the conception/writing and automating the heck out of the workflow.
This entailed moving my site from static HTML with a lot of handwritten content into a Rails-based pseudo-CMS with a lot of handwritten but machine-polished content. Downside: it is a lot more cookie cutter than it used to be. Upside: 2~4 hours of my time per unit of goodness is now 10 minutes of my time plus $100 per 30 units of goodness.