How did you actually become more effective?

Like many people here, I think a lot about how to become more awesome. I'm fairly optimistic about my chances, because I can clearly remember times in the past when I was less awesome than I am now-- not necessarily less rational, but less productive and with fewer relevant skills.¹

So I've been thinking about what changes I believe have most improved my effectiveness, changes which have caused me to learn many useful things and/or greatly increased my productive capacity. I found the list interesting:

Getting into a comfortable, highly supportive relationship: it has tremendously decreased my level of anxiety, improved my motivation to maintain a basic level of functioning, and increased my reserve capacity.
Finding enjoyable, appropriately challenging but low-stress work. Work forces me to get out of the house and interact with other humans, keeps me away from harmful behaviors like playing video games for hours, provides mental stimulation, and boosts my self-worth. Since I work as a math tutor, it's also been great practice at teaching, doing math, and the kind of general personhood skills that fall under the heading of Professionalism.
Attempting very difficult things at which I was highly motivated to succeed (but was not necessarily successful). These are the times when I've learned the most.
Limiting my own access to time-wasters by using LeechBlock and being commited to a schedule(LW is certainly on the list of time-wasters).

Things which are notably not on the list:

Therapy. If you have found therapy helpful, I'd really appreciate hearing exactly how you used it. It hasn't been worth a damn for me.
ADD meds. (Depression meds were somewhat helpful when I was actually depressed, however.)
Ambitious self-improvement projects undertaken alone, or without major consequences for failure (including but not limited to diets, exercise programs, and extensive programs of independent study³).

So how have you actually improved your own effectiveness?

¹Some of these less-awesome past versions of me suffered from clinical depression, but the last time I had a major episode of depression I was able to deal with it much more purposefully than in the past and still accomplish a large percentage of the shit I was supposed to be doing, so I think there has been improvement independent of my state of mental health.

²Major consequences for failure seem to be very effective motivators, but since I want to undertake projects that are difficult enough to have a significant chance of failure, I would like these consequences to be highly motivating without being horribly costly, if possible. Ideas?

³I have learned a lot from pleasure reading, but I'm not sure how much was actually useful, and since I've been reading for pleasure since I can remember there's no easy before-and-after comparison to make.

Getting into a comfortable, highly supportive relationship: it has tremendously decreased my level of anxiety, improved my motivation to maintain a basic level of functioning, and increased my reserve capacity.
Finding enjoyable, appropriately challenging but low-stress work. Work forces me to get out of the house and interact with other humans, keeps me away from harmful behaviors like playing video games for hours, provides mental stimulation, and boosts my self-worth. Since I work as a math tutor, it's also been great practice at teaching, doing math, and the kind of general personhood skills that fall under the heading of Professionalism.
Attempting very difficult things at which I was highly motivated to succeed (but was not necessarily successful). These are the times when I've learned the most.
Limiting my own access to time-wasters by using LeechBlock and being commited to a schedule(LW is certainly on the list of time-wasters).

Things which are notably not on the list:

Therapy. If you have found therapy helpful, I'd really appreciate hearing exactly how you used it. It hasn't been worth a damn for me.
ADD meds. (Depression meds were somewhat helpful when I was actually depressed, however.)
Ambitious self-improvement projects undertaken alone, or without major consequences for failure (including but not limited to diets, exercise programs, and extensive programs of independent study³).

So how have you actually improved your own effectiveness?

I got some positive change out of therapy, although I suspect I'm conflating therapy with some other positive stuff that happened to me around that time.

Going through almost exactly the same routine every week with respect to dealing with my negative emotions made troubleshooting negative states a habitual exercise rather than something to be occasionally stumbled over or only done with external help. Essentially, I view most of my time in therapy as training in how to be my own therapist. When I find myself frustrated/sad/demotivated/etc I can seldom stay that way for more than 15 minutes without automatically entering troubleshooting mode and asking myself why exactly I'm feeling that way, what can I do to deal with it, and so on. Prior to this particular therapist I knew all of the techniques but had trouble convincing myself to apply them consistently (or at all most of the time, since I'd already convinced myself that I was a lost cause and the techniques wouldn't work for me).

Oh and she also helped me defuse some particularly irrational and damaging beliefs that I was holding onto despite abundant evidence to the contrary, mostly by forcing me to acknowledge that the evidence existed. Before that I'd been very good at rationalising it away, but when led through it step by step by an outside source I had to choose between defying the data and updating my beliefs at least slightly.

Other things that have made me more effective include:

Making sure I'm taking care of life maintenance stuff such as getting enough sleep and socialising on a semi-regular basis. Makes me more emotionally stable, which means that I don't waste as much time or energy fighting myself to get things done.
Irrevocably locking myself into tight schedules, with consequences should I fail to stick to them, (eg. when I was writing my undergrad thesis I sent my list of deadlines to my supervisor so that he could harass me when I hadn't turned in a chapter on time. And if I don't re-learn programming before I start grad school I won't have time to do so later and I'll have serious trouble doing the research I would like to do which will then impact my ability to continue on the career path I've chosen) It's the only reliable way I've found so far to get really motivated, and this approach has led me to do huge amounts of high-quality work in relatively short periods of time.
Keeping a private blog where I record large chunks of my life and thoughts in text form. Helps me by providing a safe space for me to work through my issues, and by helping me to notice cause and effect relationships between various parts of my life and my happiness/effectiveness.

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How did you actually become more effective?

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How did you actually become more effective?

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