Don't try to become a productive superman in one day, you'll fail. Don't even decide to work towards lofty goals. Instead slow down and iterate. Move the ball f

Don't try to become a productive superman in one day, you'll fail. Don't even decide to work towards lofty goals. Instead slow down and iterate. Move the ball forward a little each day. What does that look like in practice? 1. Building routines. People don't rely on making the individual decision to exercise every day. Instead they set a schedule and stick to it until it becomes a habit. Where you'd have to specifically decide to skip the gym rather than decide to go. Imagine if people didn't have any set schedule or expectation for work hours? How much mental stress would be involved in just choosing when to deal with work. There is only so much willpower you've got, and it should be focused entirely on building habits. Only add one at a time, and find methods that help turn a decision into a routine. For some people that's religiously keeping a calendar. For others it's more ritualistic (I always go for a walk with my morning coffee). 2. Matching pursuits with available resources. Remember in HS when you had to write a paper about a subject in Biology and you had to write an essay in English class. What did you do? Wrote one paper that could meet the requirements of both. Or at least one that could be cross submitted with minor edits. Often the people holding down 2-3 jobs are copying work between areas. Doing one unit of effort for two units of credit. I.E. If you are a full time programmer, keeping up a blog about technology developments has a lot of crossover. Being a sysadmin and publishing benchmark results. 3. Min/Maxing total progress rather than fear of failures. We get a lot further by showing up everyday ready to make mistakes vs holding off waiting for more analysis/knowledge. Be the dumb noob, seek out harsh criticism and embarrassment early in the process. It's a lot easier to write off mistakes due to inexperience, than it is to explain a long term lack of progress. This area gets me all the time, because it feels right to carefully weigh all options. However any honest appraisal of the opportunity cost would show that I'd have been better off making any decision (even the worst one) and then correcting based on feedback.