/alpha/ - Self-Improvement and Motivation

How old are you? Do you exercise? Do you have any medical conditions?

First thing I'd do is get a doctor's opinion. Tell him how you feel (that exact thing you wrote). Get some blood tests done. Find out if there is anything medical going on.

Also you might want to research some nutritional supplements to help you focus. I'm only really familiar with good old caffeine, but it works for me to help me concentrate.

What else? Meditation might help. Maybe calming your mind might help you pick out what you should do next. Writing and journaling can do the same.

Finally, if you don't exercise you should start. It does wonders for your mental powers. Even simple walks in nature are great.

Try GTD (Getting Things Done).

Basically, you are always recording the things you want to do. Some of them are larger goals, but there's always this "bucket" to put them in, your inbox. There's plenty of smartphone/pad software that's set up to use GTD.

Then, regularly, go through all the "projects" (and projects here are simply things that take more than two steps to do) and come up with the next step to take on all of them.

Then you have a big list of the "next steps" you can take to accomplish your projects. You've got the information, you know what to do with it, go go go.

So if your problem is that you freeze up and can't think of the next tasks to fulfill your projects, do it routinely so that you get used to doing it and have a backlog of "next tasks" big enough to work on even if it's hard to come up with new "next tasks".

If your problem is coming up with new projects, just always be writing them down as you come up with them. When you're less creative, you cold always do the more mechanical work of coming up with the next tasks and just pedaling through them.

The book actually addresses both. It was written a long time ago so since then, there have been a lot of tools emerge that make it easier to capture and manage your lists.