Sometimes, it's easy to feel like your work has degraded into a series of interruptions--that any block of time you've set aside to focus on a project is in constant danger of being minced to bits by phone calls, emails, and the weekend anecdotes of your co-workers. Worse still, we all suffer daily from innumerable waits, delays, and last-minute reschedulings, all of which can upend our plans and lead to a constant shifting of available time.

Rather than always seeing these changes as an intractable liability, try to look at them as opportunities to liberate unexpected pockets of time and focus. While literally non-stop interruptions are likely to make any of us nutty, a slight adjustment to your planning and outlook can lead to fast gains in productivity and a much-improved attitude about your working environment.

“The Zeigarnik effect states that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed ones.”

PigPogPDA - PigPog Creativity Wiki [Introduction]

Michael Randall lays out a paper GTD-based system that should appeal to a lot of folks here.

What Is It?

• A Moleskine hack.
• An extreme Moleskine hack.
• A simplified GTD system (What system? See our GTD Introduction), with relatively little actual organising. May be useful if you fancy Doing GTD Without Doing GTD.
• A complete personal management system for those who’s needs aren’t too complicated.
• A rather over-the-top system for dealing with just the capturing and processing end of GTD.

Why?

I was finding GTD a bit much for various reasons, but didn’t want to stop entirely - I needed to be Doing GTD Without Doing GTD. This is the system I came up with in the end. It’s simpler than GTD, and wouldn’t scale to the sort of level that GTD will, but it works pretty well for me, so it seems reasonable to think it might work well for other people too.

Read on for details of a clever system for turning a Moleskine Reporter into a kind of über-notebook, in which capture, processing, and related work are handled using sticky-note flags and some light templating.

Excellent thread over on the Google Group about using a bike to commute to work.

Modest Needs has an initiative to help those folks who are helping others—even as their own finances may feel the strain.