Once you allocate the proper amount of time to an activity, you need to stick to it, and stick to it for as long as you committed to.  Don’t multi task, you are not an operating system, do the one thing you scheduled.  Focus on the one thing and get it done, multitasking will just ensure that you don’t get a number of things done at the same time.

Yet another reminder on the dangers of multitasking! The rest of this piece is also helpful on managing how you carry out the tasks you've committed to, rather than trying to manage your time.

Over the past few days, I've tried a lot of different things to escape this conundrum, and here's what worked for me:

First, spend a few minutes writing down everything you have to do on a piece of paper. Resist the urge to use technology for this task. Why? I'm not sure, but somehow writing on paper — and then crossing things out — creates momentum.

Second, spend 15 minutes — no more — knocking out as many of the easiest, fastest tasks as you can. Make your quick phone calls. Send your short emails. Don't worry about whether these are the most important tasks on your list. You're moving. The goal is to cross off as many items as possible in the shortest time. Use a timer to keep you focused.

Third, when 15 minutes are up, turn off your phone, close down all the windows on your computer, and choose the most daunting thing on your list, the one that instills the most stress or is the highest priority. Then work on it and only it — without hesitation or distraction — for 35 minutes.

After 35 minutes, take a break for 10 minutes and then start the hour-long process over again, beginning with the 15 minutes of quick actions.

For those of you who are proponents of the Pomodoro technique, this will seem familiar. What's interesting about Peter Bregman's approach is that it gives us a way to balance quick wins with important wins. The end result is a great feeling of accomplishment -- backed up by reality.

Most people’s productivity problems aren’t because they don’t have enough hours, it’s because they manage them badly. They spend way too much time trying to refine the system or chasing unimportant or distracting items, and not nearly enough time to do the work itself.

Sad but true. Interestingly, I'm hearing more reports from friends that they are feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of tasks on their to do lists. Have our workloads increased or are we less able to create and implement sensible systems for working through the list?

Michael didn't evolve his model from current practices. He broke the mold by questioning everything in the service of his objective.

Which, it turns out, is a powerful model for creativity: think backwards from where you're going, rather than forwards from where you've been. Identify the objective that's most important and then question everything else, especially standard practice.

The idea of questioning everything can be profoundly challenging. After years of socialization, many of us are taught never to question authority or the way things are. We might mutter from time to time, but we rarely push our questions to the point that we feel required to do something to change the situation.

So now we're being asked to be iconoclastic? Apparently so. And how many actually will? Relatively few. That's why this kind of creative behavior is rare and prized.

This is geo-location gone terrible," said Mr Kamkar during his presentation. "Privacy is dead people. I'm sorry.

He's sorry?

It seems as if the breaches of personal privacy are growing daily. Is anyone doing anything about this?

I bet you are wondering what my experiences have been like, since I started using it applying this technique, right? Well, I could probably just summarise it with a single word, or may be a couple of them: it just works! Yes, that’s right! For the last couple of days I have been using Pomodoro for Mac for those tasks and activities where I would need to focus perhaps a little bit more than usual and forget about any interruptions and it’s worked wonders! Those tasks / activities are now a thing of the past, when till just recently, they may have lingered for a little while longer than expected and eventually not coming out with the best of results.

So there you have it; the multitasking machine I once used to be, is now a thing of the past. Instead, I have got a few bursts of great concentration and focus spans throughout the day that help me get a better grasp of my own productivity and, funny enough, I have found it so helpful that I’m already starting to apply this Pomodoro technique to my social networking activities as well.

Ok -- I've downloaded Pomodoro for Mac on your recommendation, Luis. Full steam ahead for maximum productivity. Buckle your seat belts!

I recently happened upon a short article, Top Five Regrets of the Dying, by Bronnie Ware, who spent many years nursing people who had gone home to die. Their most common regret? "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me." Their second most common regret? "I wish I didn't work so hard."

There are two ways to address these regrets. One, work less hard and spend your time living a life true to yourself, whatever that means. Or two, work just as hard — harder even — on things you consider to be important and meaningful.

If you put those two regrets together, you realize that what people really regret isn't simply working so hard, it's working so hard on things that don't matter to them. If our work matters to us, if it represents a life true to us, then we will die without the main regrets that haunt the dying. We will have lived more fully.

"If our work matters to us, if it represents a life true to us, then we will die without the main regrets that haunt the dying. We will have lived more fully."

A lifetime is a terrible thing to waste.

We’ve lost much of this craft culture.

Students, for example, maintain an antagonistic relationship with their school work and the mental strain it demands. They fall back on the pressure of a deadline or impending college admissions decision to force them into reluctant engagement with the material — a recipe for burnouts.

The same issue plagues the modern workplace, where work is reduced to fuel for a task completion system and we fear ambiguity or scale in projects. After a while, we require the constant low-dose dopamine drip of e-mail and profile checking to limp through the endeavor.

I know that when properly-implemented, GTD techniques are meant to help you get the meaningful things done in life. However, how many people actually get past the daily to do list filled with seemingly pressing (yet ultimately trivial) tasks? How many identify, and actually focus on, the things worth doing?

It came back to me for the umpteenth time as I sat listening to an acapella vocalist: the music is as much about the spaces as it is about the notes. There’s a reason, I believe, the planned lack of sound in a musical piece is called a rest.

The importance of rest can't be overstated. Even so, we drive ourselves into a frenzy trying to get everything done without stopping for a break. What's wrong with this picture?

Living the focused life is not about trying to feel happy all the time…rather, it’s about treating your mind as you would a private garden and being as careful as possible about what you introduce and allow to grow there.

This quote, tucked innocuously at the end of the third chapter of Rapt,  Winifred Gallagher’s 2009 ode to focus, is life-changing.

Gallagher’s book begins with a cancer diagnosis (”not just cancer, but a particularly nasty, fairly advanced kind”). She realizes that this disease wants to claim her attention, and that this was no way to live what may be the last moments of her life. So she launches an experiment to reclaim her attention, relentlessly redirecting it towards the things that matter most: “big ones like family and friends, spiritual life and work, and smaller ones like movies, walks, and a 6:30 pm martini.”

Gallagher comes away from the experiment with a good prognosis for her disease and a visceral appreciation of a surprising fact: “life is the sum total of what you focus on,” yet most people expend little effort cultivating this focus.

This is worth reading and rereading.