"The Fundamental Questions were pioneered by Eliezer and Mike Blume respectively, I think. "What do you think you know, and why do you think you know it?" (and permutations thereof) is the First Question; "What are you doing, and why are you doing it?" is the Second. I sometimes forget that not everyone has absorbed all of Less Wrong canon! My bad."
The order of these questions should be switched.
PS: How do you 'quote'?
One method for increasing high utility productivity I thought up was choosing a specific well-defined answer for the second half ("Why am I doing it?") and consistently checking to see if the answer to the first half satisfyingly aligns with the second half. For example, if I'd checked myself an hour ago, it'd be "I'm learning to program because I want to maximize the probability of FAI development." Ideally the second half would be related to a 'something to protect' or 'definite major purpose' that stays constant over time and that you want to be consistently moving towards. If you're already good at noticing rationalization this technique might work to induce cognitive dissonance when engaging in suboptimal courses of action. (Whether or not inducing cognitive dissonance in order to make yourself more productive is likely to work is open to debate. I suspect P.J. Eby would thoroughly disagree.) I'm going to try this over the next few days and see if the results are any better than how I've been doing recently. I am at a relative productivity high point right now though, so the data might not be too meaningful. I encourage others to see if this method works.