Deliberately put things with deadlines off until relatively soon before the deadline so you can harness the motivation provided by the deadline. If you don't have any deadlines coming up, work on deadline-free to-do items.

I've been doing this for the past few years ever since I thought of it. I do think it's good to be aware of deadlines that are coming up if you're doing this--it wasn't good for my mental health to feel like my life was out of control and deadlines were bearing down on me from all directions. Another thing is that if you put something off and do it right before the deadline, you probably won't do as good of a job. So this tactic works relatively better for things you don't care about doing well or learning from the experience of doing. Overall, the main benefit is having more time to work on deadline-free stuff, and it's hard to measure how much additional time I've gotten that way.

+3