This is a really stupid productivity trick, but it works so well for me that I thought I'd share it in case it works well for others.

When I arrived at work this morning, I had 4 things that all had to be done fairly urgently: create a storyboard for a video to be reviewed at a meeting tomorrow morning, revise some documentation before sending it to a developer for review, provide some documentation effort estimates for the next release, and deal with some online Help bugs. My problem is that it would be fairly easy to spend an entire day doing any of these, and I can't decide which to do first.

Fortunately, I keep a kitchen timer on my desk. This morning, I set it for one hour and started in on the storyboard. At the end of the hour, I had a rough storyboard complete. Given my perfectionism, I could easily have spent another hour tweaking and polishing, but since my timer was up, I just sent it out to the meeting attendees.

Then I set my timer for another hour and dove into the documentation estimates. When that hour's up (I've paused the timer to compose this post), I will decide whether I want to spend another hour on the estimates, or switch to bug fixing.

You'd be surprised how much you can accomplish in just an hour if you don't allow yourself to spend any of that hour worrying about whether you should be doing something else instead. (Or worse, trying to do something else at the same time.)

So, I've been working out more frequently on the elliptical trainer lately, since that's my alternative to walking outside when it's either raining or beastly hot, and it's been one or the other surprisingly often recently. I've also discovered that the more intense workout offered by the elliptical machine provides an endorphin boost that really helps in dealing with stress.

Anyway, I'd been getting frustrated that after a period of a couple of years of intermittently using the elliptical machine, I was still using it at its lowest resistance setting, and was burning about the same number of calories and traveling about the same "distance" in each workout. It may be silly, but I feel like if I'm going to spend an hour doing something that gets me disgustingly sweaty, I want to see some progress. (Also, I'm jealous of my dear old dad, who can bicycle 50 miles a day, and gets results on his cardiac stress tests that make medical technicians swoon. I figure if I start now, maybe I can be buff by the time I retire.)

So, a few weeks ago, I started jotting down the resistance level I used, calories burned, and distance traveled on a sheet of paper after each workout. And lo and behold, I've seen the calories and distance go slowly but definitely up over time, and today I set the resistance up to level 2 and kept it there for the entire workout.

It's long been a mantra of mine that you cannot improve what you don't track. But it still surprises me how often tracking is not only necessary, but sufficient, for improvement.