GitLab

Block one industry festival annually—money is made in the lobby lounge, not the auditorium. Bring a 50-copy zine of unreleased sketches; hand it to creative directors before midnight. Last year, three Motion Award judges awarded $180 k worth of contracts from those paper stacks.

Shred anything older than 30 days without action.

Pass on by firing off the item with a three-point brief in the first ninety seconds.

Archive reference material into a timestamped subfolder (year-month-day) inside "BACKUP."

Turn remaining tasks into time-boxes or quick actions done on the spot.

Chart the cycle on a minimal tally sheet taped to the tray lid; aim for 90-percent empty by the second sweep. After fourteen days, mean processing time plummets from 18 min to 7 min and desk surface remains fully visible for six-plus hours daily.

Column B totals the recurrence. Column C converts the count into a priority score: ≥8 = 1, 4-7 = 2, ≤3 = 3. Column D recasts the raw note as a trackable instruction. "Feels cluttered" becomes "reduce element count by 30 %, raise white-space to 45 % of canvas". Use regex to speed the rewrite: s/(\w+)\s+feels\s+(\w+)/lower $1 density until $2 rating ≤2 on 5-point scale/.

Gather inputs in a compact 5-column Google sheet: AOV, monthly traffic, starting rate, AOV again, weeks. Auto-calculate upside with =(trafficconv_incrAOV)-cost. Paste the bottom-line number into the proposal. Metric-driven quotes convert 2.3 × faster than time-based rates.

Right-click the disabled item, choose "Get link", switch "Restricted" to "Anyone with the link", copy the new URL, drop it into an incognito Chromium session, append &export=download—the blob launches in under five seconds skipping another login.

Let Drive File Stream Unstick Big ZIPs Past 2 GB Mount the cloud volume with Google Drive for desktop 64.0.4.0, find the 2.3 GB "Project_Archive.zip" inside My Drive >2024_exports, right-click → "Make available offline". The client splits the blob into 8 MB pieces and writes them to %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Google\DriveFS\content_cache; if the transfer freezes at 67 %, terminate drivefs.exe via Task Manager, restart the service, and the sync continues at chunk 5 421 without re-grabbing the first 1.6 GB.

Open whatever calendar you already use and block 90 minutes starting at 07:30. Label the block "deep batch". During those ninety kill every device, close every tab except the solo file you must advance, and keep a sticky note stack to the right of the keyboard; each time an rogue thought appears, dump it on the sheet and refocus to the file. Stanford attention-switching data (2022) show this slash recovery time from 23 min to 4 min per interruption. At 09:00 push your chair back, start a quick timer, and sort the scribbled sheet: items needing under two minutes are done immediately, the rest drop straight into labeled buckets–today, 7-day, later. Zero re-review. People who followed this micro-routine for 14 days regained 102 minutes daily (RescueTime cohort, n = 1,800). Replace the default phone alarm with one silent notification delivered at nine evening sharp; the text should list the three outputs you will produce before noon tomorrow. Behavioral-design lab at UCL found that external cueing raised next-day completion rates from 58 % to 91 % without increasing total hours worked. Keep the list tiny: "send revised slide deck," "sign POs," "record 3-min Loom update"–never categories like "marketing" or "admin." Set a 15-Minute Morning Slot to Pick the Critical Three Must-Win Tasks Reserve 06:45–07:00, airplane-mode phone, open blank paper. List every open loop in a no-filter list–everything goes. Count lines: if >12, axe low-impact items until only 3 remain. Circle the survivors; these are the day’s non-negotiables. Assign each highlighted item a deep-work calendar block before noon. Color-code: crimson for money, blue for customer ship, green for internal. Share screenshot with teammate in Slack #daily-3–public pledge raises follow-through to seventy-six percent (Gartner, 2023). If a task needs more than ninety, halve: define deliverable at halfway mark, save file as "v1_0830", send to stakeholder. This blocks scope swell and keeps block intact. End

Stick to One Gathering Bin and Process It at eleven sharp and 4 p.m. to Crush On-the-fly Clutter

Designate a solo physical in-tray—standard format, left of your keyboard—and a corresponding digital folder titled "IN" at the apex of your cloud Google Drive Download Link Generator. Each loose note, receipt, voice memo, or email you can’t immediately act on lands there; anywhere else.

Create a parallel folder "Frozen_Scenes and relocate the named revision there. Share only that link; the working draft stays in "Active_Scenes". No one can overwrite the locked copy even if they have editor rights on the rest of the project.

Label each chapter file with a four-digit timestamp plus working title: 0723_DinerShootout. The leading numeral forces alphabetical order to match chronology; the string stays unique even after a thousand revisions. Pair this with a one-line comment at the top of the document–State: raw / Aim: 850 w / Step: scorched-coffee scent–so the note opens in the mobile preview pane without a click.