Thanks for your input and suggestions everyone! I'm going to answer some of the points raised thematically rather than post-by-post (for efficiency ;) )
- Motivation is definitely a factor related to time management, and also a very complicated issue that's tied in to a lot of different things. Heck, something as simple as sleep--seemed like this past week every other night I was only getting 4-6 hrs of poor, interrupted sleep and my focus and motivation was tanking. But also stuff like pleasurability/satisfaction vs "ugh factor" of an activity (obviously), or confidence vs fear/anxiety about it, those kinds of things. In addition, of course, to its perceived importance.
- Intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation. I feel like these are sometimes used as extremes on a very polarized scale: intrinsic-good, extrinsic-bad. But I think that while some people are driven to pursue their own ideas, ventures, etc, others are intrinsically driven to help/serve others and that's a good thing (you can't make a team where everyone just wants to do Their Thing). I think I belong to the latter group; it's not that I'm not driven if I don't have a stick over my head, it's that I want/need to know someone else will benefit from my work, or needs it, or expects it.
- I love To Do lists! However, they tend to result in some important, non-urgent, unpleasant task constantly falling to the bottom. I find them particularly great for something like planning for a trip, where tasks actually disappear once completed...it's far less satisfying when there's just a few tasks in a day, and possibly one task goes on for several days (e.g. if I have to process data from 100 tests, I either have "process data" as a task for 5 days straight, or "process 1-20" gets replaced by "process 21-40" which isn't much more satisfying...) I do also like them for prioritizing long-term, like when I finish a big task and know I have a couple others and am not sure what to start on; writing them out can help articulate the parameters of the tasks and pick the most important one. Maybe I should make it a habit to do this kind of prioritizing more often/regularly, but it doesn't seem like something that'll work great day-to-day, at least where I am now.
- Incidentally, although as a 21st century human I do get distracted from what I think I should be doing by stuff online, I also have a tendency to get sidetracked into cleaning and cooking. Not-unimportant, satisfying (sometimes pleasant), tasks that I'm good at. But ultimately not the most important thing I could be working on. (And obviously, there's a minimal degree of hygiene and nutrition to uphold, and then there's optional aspects of both these tasks. Sometimes it's hard to decide if making-that-thing-I-want is "worth it").
- I really like the idea of simply categorizing the anticipated time sink of a task (minutes, hour, half-day, full-day, N days). Except it might be I need to go up one for my estimates, since one thing that tanks my to-do lists is excessive optimism.
- Willpower vs laziness. Absolutely true, though I would hate to go through life just forcing myself to do things and hating it rather than getting enthused. It's like...if you just approach frugality through deprivation rather than through enjoying simple pleasures and the "cha ching" instinct when you put money away. I'm looking to get better at structuring my minutes similar to how I do my dollars, except the former comes less naturally to me.
One of my larger roles at work is project manager so I am constantly keeping myself and others on task.
caracarn, I'd be really curious to hear more from you from a professional project management perspective... If it's part of your role (either alone or collectively with coworkers), how do you lay out the plan for a long-term project (I presume you're dealing with multi-month or multi-year, multi-person projects). How do you decide what "on task" or "on track" is? And then how do you deal with it when things start going off-track for any reason (obviously there's stuff like outages, delays backorders, medical issues, etc happen as well as people not performing up to their potential/expectations...but either way the projects end up set back)? How do you curb excessive optimism about what is possible?
Thanks again everybody!