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Yes, great reply.

Another approach I've used to getting focus is to look at your projects in OF, figure out which you are going to focus on and then pull out 3-5 tasks you are going to do in the next day or so.

It's important to remember that you can only do one thing at a time. The more committed you can be to just doing that one thing, the more likely you to do it.

I have taken to putting my 3-5 priority tasks into a file in NV Alt.

Then, with Geektool, I publish that task list onto the desktop of my computer. So anytime I look at the desktop, it's easy to see what I'm supposed to be focusing on. If I edit the text file, Geektool updates the info on the desktop too.

From there, I've been trying to use the Pomodoro method to dig down and focus on one of those tasks for a solid 25 minutes. Then, I take a rest, etc. Unless the Pomodoro is devoted to admin or e-mail, I try to only check e-mail in between the Pomodoros.

It's not a perfect system. Probably, you can accomplish a lot of it inside OF, without doing what I've suggested. There's just something about the act of choosing the tasks and writing them down in a separate place that helps me to invest in those as a priority. Perhaps, putting all you project folders on hold except for 3-5 gets you about the same place. I just prefer to leave OF as kind of my repository of stuff and if I put folders into on hold that are still actually active projects, I worry that I'll forget about them in there. But that's probably my issue/fear/problem.

The bottom line is that once you have your task/info/projects, etc inside of a tool like OF, you have a lot more options in terms of how you can mold it to your needs (or use it in other tools).

Beyond that, I think it's worth think about some of the concepts in this piece that references the 4 burners theory. It's implicit in wilsonng's post, but this article perhaps adds some stuff to it to think about.