1. The strawman proposal. Suppose a decision needs to be made, and it might not be clear which option is best, due to limited information, trade-offs, differen

1. The strawman proposal. Suppose a decision needs to be made, and it might not be clear which option is best, due to limited information, trade-offs, different preferences, etc. Solutions A, B, and C are possible. You schedule a meeting, and a lot of time is used up going around in circles because there is no compelling reason why one is better than another. The hack is to tweak how the meeting agenda is framed. The agenda is no longer to pick a solution. Instead, you pre-select one somewhat arbitrarily, and you call it the strawman proposal. The meeting agenda becomes unseating it with a better one. Maybe you start with A and everyone quickly agrees that B is better. From there, you can't decide whether or not C is better than B, but people walk away with a feeling that voices were heard and there is some rationality to how the decision was made. Or maybe you start with A and nobody can convince anybody that B or C is necessarily better. People walk away with acceptance of the idea that it's somewhat arbitrary and further discussion would have no benefit. In either case, it's easier to achieve consensus about whether you have unseated a proposal than it is to achieve consensus about converging on one. I definitely don't recommend using this to sneak through your personal favorite option unless you want to burn through goodwill. 2. Consider doing your most dreaded to-do item first. The obvious way to decide which task to tackle next is to do it based on importance. Instead, sometimes it's useful to do the scariest or most unpleasant one first. The stress of knowing it's still on there can distract you and make you less productive while you work on the other things. By the same token, once you have faced it, you will feel energized, which will probably translate to increased productivity in other things. Also, if the task is so dreaded that you have some doubt whether you'll do it at all, leaving it to linger can create feelings of guilt or discouragement. Even if there are legitimate reasons it shouldn't be the very first thing you do, it's too easy to feel you're doing it later because you aren't ready to face it. Obviously you can take this too far. Don't make your to-do list entirely about catering to your emotional state. Being able to put aside worry is also a good thing. 3. With habits that require discipline, define success as being committed to getting back on the horse. You want to stick to an exercise plan, floss your teeth, be more considerate, etc. So you start doing it but then you get out of the habit. Now you feel like you've failed because your goal was to do X every day but you didn't. So instead, make doing X every day one of your goals, but don't consider it true failure if you don't achieve it. It should be a very high priority, of course, but the only actual failure is wavering in your commitment to start up X again if you get out of the habit.