Off tangent, but the biggest improvement in my software development productivity happened when I read Edmond Lau's book "The Effective Engineer" and started ask

Off tangent, but the biggest improvement in my software development productivity happened when I read Edmond Lau's book "The Effective Engineer" and started asking myself before I started every task: is this task the one which is highest leverage? Edmond's definition of leverage = Impact Produced/Time Invested You can read the book for more on Edmond's definition of leverage, but this seemingly simple idea did absolute wonders for my productivity. I realized the Pomodoro technique was most effective for me for the lower leverage tasks, and not so much for the higher leverage tasks. As a result, over time I sort of moved away from using it.