Not claiming to be a "highly productive person", but there are a few rules that I've learned along the way. These are true for me at least. 1) Context switchin

Not claiming to be a "highly productive person", but there are a few rules that I've learned along the way. These are true for me at least. 1) Context switching is expensive. Know your tools/language well, avoid interruptions. 2) You probably only have something like 4-5 hours max per day where your brain can effectively handle hard thinking tasks. Accept this and try to plan your day to get the most out of this time. For a lot of people this tends to be early in the morning, others late at night. 3) Plan all of your low cognitive tasks outside of this time. Bug reports, user support, whatever. I'm also a sysadmin so I have a whole bunch of these tasks. 4) If you have a lot of those low-cognitive cost tasks, make sure that they're well documented so you can have a wiki open on one monitor and a shell/web page/whatever in the other so you can get through lots of these quickly and without invoking many brain cells. 5) related to 2 - you probably only have a maximum of 50 hours a week where you can work effectively. The odd 70 week is probably fine, but do this on a regular/continual basis and your cognitive ability starts to decline, depression/burn-out/resentment and other things start to creep in. 6) related to 5 - keep some semblance of a work/life balance. Eat well, do regular strenuous excersize, see your friends/family, get away from work for a few days, etc. 7) enjoy what you do.